A Hogwarts Legacy sequel is one of Warner Bros' 'biggest priorities'
At the start of 2024, Warner Bros. went on its own little victory lap over the success of Hogwarts Legacy. WB Interactive Entertainment president David Hassad announced in early January the game had sold over 22 million copies in 2023, more than 2 million of those in the festive period, boasting that this made it «the best-selling game of the year in the entire industry worldwide.»
This is not surprising. Regardless of any controversies around its creator J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the wider Wizarding World is among the biggest media franchises on the planet, and has made more money than things like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Call of Duty. Hogwarts Legacy wasn't the first Potter game, but previously the titles had been movie tie-ins, Lego versions of same, puzzle games and mobile titles: this was the first standalone big-budget game set in that universe, and a big audience had been waiting a long time for such a treatment.
Success on this kind of scale makes a sequel of some sort inevitable, and WB Discovery’s CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels has now come right out and said it: as well as giving a vague timeframe.
«Obviously, a successor to ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ is one of the biggest priorities in a couple of years down the road,» said Wiedenfels, during the Bank of America’s 2024 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference (thanks, Variety). «So there is certainly a significant growth contribution from that [games] business in our strategic outlook here.»
That implication of a 2026 release date may well just be some casual language, though it would put three years between the original and the sequel, roughly the kind of schedule that WB's highly successful Arkham series ran on. That may sound a little tight at the AAA end but one notable asset of this series is in the name: each entry has to be set in and around Hogwarts somehow, and WB Avalanche has already built the place.
Speaking of Arkham, Weidenfels went on to describe Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the
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