Shaun of the Dead actor Nick Frost has disabled comments on a post celebrating his casting in HBO’s Harry Potter series, after fans reacted with upset over his involvement.
HBO announced yesterday (14 April) that the 53-year-old British actor, known for Hot Fuzz and The World’s End, will star as half-giant Rubeus Hagrid in its TV adaptation of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels.
While mega fans of Rowling’s wizarding world have praised HBO’s casting team for lining up Frost as Hagrid, others have taken aim at Frost and his fellow future Harry Potter stars over their involvement in a series being executively produced by Rowling.
JK Rowling has repeatedly made her ‘gender-critical’ views on the transgender community clear, while she was recently criticised by asexual campaigners for branding International Asexuality Day “fake oppression” day.
Comments have now been disabled on his celebration post after fans pointed out that he would be working on a Rowling project.
Still, those disappointed in the star’s decision to be involved in Rowling’s work have begun flooding the comment sections on his other posts, with one reading: “You always were an artist I highly admired. Please think again if you want to get involved with that woman, you might lose a lot of fans with that decision.”
To be clear, they aren’t upset at the casting, they’re upset that Rowling is involved at all.
I think I’m more annoyed that they’re re-doing the franchise at all. Why bother? It’s been done! Move on! Try something that hasn’t been done already.
They’re re-doing it because Rowling wants a new production with actors who aren’t vocally outspoken in support of LGBTQ+, she came out and said it explicitly. This further doubles down that anyone involved in this production is an absolute pelican of a human being and should be shamed.
Nick Frost isn’t in support of LGBTQ+? That’s kind of shocking…
No, not that he’s not in support of LGBTQ, but that he hasn’t been outspoken in his distaste for Rowling’s support of anti-LGBTQ policy and rhetoric, like the 3 main actors in the HP movies were.
Ah, got it. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. ;)
In the highly likely event of it being worse than the original films, would it be go broke for not going woke?
Yes, it seems strange to re-make the franchise at this time. All 7 novels were adapted into a highly successful film series, so it’s not as though it is like The Chronicles of Narnia where no adaptation has ever completed the series.
Exactly, or works that have never even been attempted and there are a BUNCH of those.
Need a replacement for Game of Thrones? How about Elric of Melniboné?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melniboné
Thieve’s World?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves'_World
Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafhrd_and_the_Gray_Mouser
Want something with a youth hook like Harry Potter? The Belgariad and Malloreon by David and Leigh Eddings:~~https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belgariad~~
~~https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Malloreon~~
Replacing one problematic author with one with different problems isn’t a solution.
How about Roger Zelazny and the Chronicles of Amber? Still safe?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Amber
If Rowling is too toxic, probably best to avoid the Eddings too. Feist’s Riftwar instead perhaps
Didn’t they keep a kid locked in a cage in their basement?
I didn’t know that before enjoying most of their stuff, as a kid, but damn.
Never heard about that, and years before he was published…
YES RIFTWAR
I really think a lot of piers anthony would be perfect for anime adaptions.
Ooh, yeah, I could see that. Get Studio Ghibli on it…
I would burn entire continents to ash for a good Elric series. Hell, any of the Eternal Champions would be sick.
How many more Targaryens and Geralts must we endure before this is adapted?
I heard a rumour that Rowling wants to distance the brand from Radcliffe, Watson, and Grint.
Culture has fossilised. Nothing new is being made, just rehashes of the same “safe” shite because bigwigs know the stuff that already exists will make them that sweet, sweet money.
The only way to free ourselves is to stop consuming the overdone cash cow slop. If we don’t vote with our wallets and make it not profitable for them, it will never stop. They’ll keep regurgitating the same “remakes and reboots” until society collapses. Resist FOMO. Stop consuming.
Also fuck Rowling.
I really liked Tenet
This is why I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch all the new Star Wars stuff. Or all the new Lord of the Rings stuff. Or all the new Marvel stuff. It’s just all a fuckin hokey cash grab. However, there are still a LOT of new things coming out that are great. I watch a new (to me) movie just about every night, and there’s been some real gems.
People don’t spend money to go see “new” shit, but do spend money to see rehashed “safe” shit, so why would studios bother trying to make anything else.
Like it or not, money talks. And the public has overwhelmingly said this is what they prefer.
It’s the other way around.
Studios used to take chances on new IP’s back in the day when they didn’t have to make a billion dollars at the box office just to “break even” (I’m being a tad hyperbolic about that number). There’s a clip of Matt Damon on ‘Hot Ones’ breaking this down. For those who can’t (or don’t want to) click the link, it basically goes like this:
In the days before the streaming boom, a movie studio could afford to spend a bunch of money producing and marketing an original movie, knowing that what they sank into production and advertising would most likely be recouped in video rentals, in the event that the movie under-performed at the box office. Once physical movie rentals went away, so did all that back end money, and studios became a lot more hesitant to take those kinds of risks. The end result was that studios started buying existing IP’s that were already popular and producing those almost exclusively. The final death throes of video rental stores happened in the mid-to-late 2000s (think MCU Phase 1 era), and that’s where we saw the big increase in reboots, sequels, prequels, franchises, and cinematic universes.
So basically, the majority of big studios lost a ton of revenue from the defunct video rental business, so they did a bunch of market research to find out what people liked (or rather, what made the most money), then decided that was pretty much all they were going to make from then on. The public ate it up for the same reason they eat junk food or smoke meth; it has no substance, but it has all the right ingredients to trigger a dopamine response.
The fault here lies with the dealer, not the junkie.
Money talks if profit is the only goal, and all money talks is bullshit.
Congratulations, you just discovered the goals of studio executives.
I’ll add that the cost to see anything is so freakn high right now that no one wants to chance losing so much money on something new that turns out to be a dud. So safe it is!
But $$$$
Ya but… Money
honestly, at this point, I feel like they’ll just ruin whatever I liked and they touch.
I’m still salty at what “they” did to Tom Bombadill. did him dirty, they did.
You think of this post as politics rather than, say, celebrity drama or movie studio drama?
The complaints are especially political given the current administration.