A viral movie poster for Harry Potter: The Return of the Dark Lord has fans excited that the fantasy franchise will be returning to the big screen in 2025
The mainline Harry Potter series released eight blockbuster movies over a decade. The saga ended with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two in 2011.
While the Wizarding World franchise has continued since, via the Fantastic Beasts movies, many have wondered whether the Boy Who Lived will live again on screen.
Harry Potter: The Return of the Dark Lord Movie Poster Explained
A movie poster for a supposed new film titled Harry Potter: The Return of the Dark Lord has been gaining traction on Facebook.
The poster promotes the return of Daniel Radcliffe and Ralph Fiennes as their characters from the blockbuster saga, Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort.
The poster art features a side angle of Harry facing off with the Dark Lord, with the ruins of Hogwarts castle in the background. This is presumably an attempt to mirror the poster of the final Harry Potter film.
As many commenters have noted, there are a few giveaways that the poster for this new film is fake.
For starters, the image of the villain in the poster does not look at all like Ralph Fiennes' depiction of Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films. Instead, it seems to be an AI-generated image based off of the prompt for a 'Dark Lord'.
The poster was also posted by an unofficial movie fan page with no links to any verifiable sources.
There is officially no Harry Potter: The Return of the Dark Lord film in development, but there are other projects related to the Wizarding World on the way.
Will Harry Potter Return?
While a 2025 Harry Potter sequel is not in development, plans are in motion to reboot the series on television.
In 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery commissioned a Harry Potter television show, based on J.K. Rowling's original seven books, which is expected to be released on HBO in 2026.
The remake will cast new actors in the roles of the beloved characters and will reportedly run for up to a decade. It currently has Succession alumni Francesca Gardiner and Mark Mylod on board to showrun and direct respectively.
It's well-known that the restrictions of a feature film runtime caused a lot of the content of the lengthy Harry Potter books to be cut from the movies.
The idea behind this live-action reboot of the Harry Potter franchise, which comes barely a decade after the film saga wrapped up, is that the TV series format will allow for a much deeper dive into the events of the books.
No further casting announcements or plot details for the upcoming reboot have been announced.
The Harry Potter movies are currently streaming on Max.
