Harry Potter: Fan-Made Voldemort Prequel Gets Warner Bros. Blessing

Fan-produced films have become much more prominent in the age of YouTube. But when it comes to big [...]

By Joseph Schmidt

Fan-produced films have become much more prominent in the age of YouTube. But when it comes to big budgets, it becomes a world of intellectual properties, copyright law, and cease-and-desist letters.

A recent trailer for a forthcoming Harry Potter fan film has made the rounds, bringing new eyeballs to the project that suffered a cancelled campaign on Kickstarter. But despite some initial concerns from Warner Bros., fans can still expect to see Voldemort: Origins Of The Heir in the near future.

The filmmakers of the production at Tryangle Films revealed Warner Bros. contacted them during the Kickstarter campaign. They wouldn't go into details about the specifics, but they revealed the company allowed them to continue making their movie with the characters under a major condition.

"The only thing we can say is that they let us proceed with the film, in a non profit way, obviously," director Gianmaria Pezzato wrote to Polygon in an email.

The short film chronicles the life of Tom Marvolo Riddle, who would eventually become Harry Potter's arch nemesis Lord Voldemort.

The trailer made waves when it began being spread online due to its high production values and great special effects. It looks as if it were made by the production teams behind the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts movies.

The fact that Warner Bros is allowing the film continue should be encouraging to fans. While it's obviously not from the mind of J.K. Rowling and thus isn't canon, it's still amazing to see the people she inspired bring their own interpretations to series lore.

The Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them series will unlikely pick up on this thread considering they take place in the United States and focus on Gellert Grindelwald, another evil wizard, in the role of villain.

Tryangle Films is slated to start post-production work on Voldemort: Origins Of The Heir in the coming months with the hopes to release it for free online before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Rowling just finished the script for Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them 2, with production set to pick up later this year. That movie will hit theaters November 16, 2018.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an all-new adventure returning us to the wizarding world created by J.K. Rowling. Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) stars in the central role of wizarding world magizoologist Newt Scamander, under the direction of David Yates, who helmed the last four Harry Potter blockbusters. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opens in 1926 as Newt Scamander has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident…were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt's fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them also stars Katherine Waterston (Steve Jobs, Inherent Vice) as Tina; Tony Award winner Dan Fogler (The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) as Jacob; Alison Sudol (Dig, Transparent) as Tina's sister, Queenie; Ezra Miller (Trainwreck) as Credence; two-time Oscar nominee Samantha Morton (In America, Sweet and Lowdown) as Mary Lou; Oscar winner Jon Voight (Coming Home, TV's Ray Donovan) as Henry Shaw, Sr.; Ron Perlman (the Hellboy films) as Gnarlack; Carmen Ejogo (Selma) as Seraphina; Jenn Murray (Brooklyn) as Chastity; young newcomer Faith Wood-Blagrove as Modesty; and Colin Farrell (True Detective) as Percival Graves.

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