‘Harry Potter’-Inspired Rom-Com Is Getting Loads of Attention in Hollywood

A Harry Potter-inspired romantic comedy made this year’s Hollywood Black List, along with many other scripts that were popular within the community but ultimately not produced. The prospective movie would be called A Hufflepuff Love Story, and was written by Sophia Lopez. It would be about a Hogwarts student less famous than Harry Potter looking for a way to add some stakes to his own life.

“Unpopular Hogwarts student Finn blames everything bad in his life on being sorted into Hufflepuff rather than Gryffindor with Harry Potter and the cool kids,” reads the synopsis on the official Black List. “So when he discovers a chance to go back in time and fix that, he takes it – only to discover things aren’t quite as simple as he’d imagined.” The movie obviously poses some problems with intellectual property rights, not to mention the recent controversies around the Harry Potter franchise. Still, the idea was popular enough to land on page 8 of the Black List.

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The Black List is compiled annually with the input of film executives who give honorable mentions to the feature film screenplays they read each year without purchasing. This year’s list required that at least seven out of the 375 executives polled mention a movie for it to make the final cut.

Other notable projects on this year’s list include celebrity biopics pitched for Kanye West, Michael Bay and Donald Trump, as well as sports dramas depicting episodes in the lives of Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman. Black List creator Franklin Leonard told Vanity Fair: “The biopic remains a favorite genre on the Black List, and I can’t imagine that changing any time soon.”

Scripts can hover on the Black List for years, so long as executives continue to mention them, as the script for Yasuke reportedly has. However, some are eventually picked up and produced, including seven that have gone on to win Best Picture at the Oscars. These include Spotlight and Slumdog Millionaire, while the movies Jojo Rabbit and Promising Young Woman went on to win Best Screenplay.

Stories like this make the Black List more than just a fun yearly round-up. It can have a real impact on the life of a writer, even if it doesn’t come with any promise of payment on its own. Leonard also operates “Black List labs,” which are workshop programs for up-and-coming writers to get their work off of the list and onto the screen.

“If nothing else, it means that as an organization, we’re doing a good job of identifying talented folks from outside the system who deserve attention from it,” he said. “And then effectively shining a bright spotlight on them so that they can have opportunities that befit their talent.”