Tag: jk rowling

Expelliarmus! And faster than you can say Severus Snape, the dork magic that is wokeness has been neutralized. J.K. Rowling is being let out of her PC jail cell by the new chief of Warner Bros. Discovery.

You may have noticed that when it came time to engineer a Harry Potter 20th-anniversary reunion on New Year’s Day for HBO Max, the company seemed to treat Rowling like a muggle. She appeared only in archival footage. That was strange, but then again, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and “Fantastic Beasts” star Katherine Waterston have all taken disgraceful/ungrateful little pokes at Rowling. HBO Max seemed uncertain whether she deserved a lot of attention at a Harry Potter celebration. It’s not like she was important to that franchise or anything.

But this spring a new headmaster, David Zaslav, came in to run Warner Bros., which made the Harry Potter films. Zaslav has already made two big, and hilarious moves: Canceling CNN+, and uncanceling Rowling. Zaslav is meeting with Rowling to discuss new Harry Potter projects, reports the Wall Street Journal.

That’s news because as the Fantastic Beasts series dwindles into oblivion, the industry trades have been a little quiet about new Rowling projects lately. (Lately she popped up in the news when Vladimir Putin complained that the West was canceling Russia just like it canceled Rowling. Rowling fired back that she didn’t invade Ukraine).

Presumably, we’ll be getting some new Rowling/Potter content. Hurrah! The Prisoner of Wokezkaban is free.

Rowling, known for holding such extremist views as “women are a different thing from men,” was subjected to online harassment from Twitter mobs who insisted that her reputation be cast into the hellfire flames of Mordor. [I think you’re getting mixed up with a different franchise —Ed.] Although most of Rowling’s antagonists appeared to be either spotty 14-year-olds or adjunct professors of gender studies, AT&T proved that a $100 billion-dollar corporation can cave quicker than the French army in 1940 and cast the Cloak of Invisibility over Rowling.

Zaslav, who according to the Journal is such a workaholic that he starts work at 6 a.m. and is pushing for the Starbucks on the Warners lot to stay open 24 hours, has been flicking his lightsaber in every direction to cut costs [Do you even watch these movies? — Ed] and reduce headcount at the newly-rechristened company. He even dared to ask execs why Warners made the terrible Clint Eastwood movie “Cry Macho” last year. (Answer: Eastwood’s previously made non-terrible movies, so we owe him this.) So his apparent willingness to make big bets on Rowling indicates he thinks she’s vital to the company’s future growth prospects, Twitter be damned.

Zaslav has also signaled he wants CNN to sound more like a news network and less like an all-night meeting of the Bard College Young Hysterians Club. “I think people in America are looking for a place where people aren’t yelling and giving opinions,” Zaslav told CNBC this week, “and they’re looking for more news and so that’s what you’ll see from CNN.”

Along with the moves by Ron DeSantis, who refused to be bullied by Woke Disney; Elon Musk, who has vowed to unshackle speech on Twitter (if he ever actually buys it); and Netflix, which last week informed its squeaky-toy coterie of aggrieved activists that Dave Chappelle is more important than they are and “Netflix may not be the best place for you,” the rise of Zaslav suggests that the Great Unwokening may already have begun.

The way things are going, it may soon be safe to state true things again.