The Wizarding World Takes Shape: HBO Announces Key “Harry Potter” Series Casting Updates

HBO’s Harry Potter series is coming into focus. Following the casting news of the core three—Dominic McLaughlin as Harry Potter, Arabella Stanton as Hermione Granger, and Alastair Scout as Ron Weasley—nine new cast members have just been revealed.

The new cast includes the Malfoys and Dursleys, crucial characters in the Potterverse. The first season of the HBO series will cover the events in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. 

HBO’s “Harry Potter” Series Casts its Young Harry, Hermione, and Ron

A trio of young wizards has just earned admission to Hogwarts.

HBO’s Harry Potter series has found its Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley in Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton, and Alastair Scout, respectively. These three newcomers will take the roles made famous by Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Emma Watson as Hermione, and Rupert Grint as Ron across eight feature films.

“After an extraordinary search led by casting directors Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann,

Mike White Promises a Much Darker Season of “The White Lotus”

The White Lotus creator, Mike White, has been refreshingly candid about what the thematic framing has been around the first two seasons. Season one, set at the titular resort’s Hawaii location, was about money, White has said. Season two, set in Sicily, was about sex. Each season, however, dealt a deliciously dark twist at its end, with season one’s hotel manager, Armond (a perfectly cast Murray Bartlett), meeting a grim fate, while season two kicked off by letting viewers know it would end in death,

Death Stalks the Vacationers in “The White Lotus” Season 3 Trailer

“By the end of the week, you will be an entirely different person,” promises a staff member at the Thailand location of the White Lotus resort in the official trailer for season 3. Mike White’s killer comedy returns, and this meaty, nearly three-minute look spells out big trouble in Thailand for our vacationers and the assorted resort staff tasked with taking care of their impossible needs.

“What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand”

The Vacation Continues: “The White Lotus” Renewed For Season 4

The trip continues.

The White Lotus Season 4 has been officially greenlit by HBO before the first episode of Season 3 has aired. Variety reports that Mike White’s razor-sharp satire will return, with production likely to begin in 2026. There’s no indication yet where the fourth season will take place and whether any cast members will return (Natasha Rothwell, an alumnus from Season 1, is returning for the third season).

A Riveting New Teaser Confirms “The Last of Us” Season 2 Arriving on HBO in April

The second season of HBO and Sony Pictures TV’s gripping drama The Last of Us will sink its teeth into our eyeballs this April, Sony confirmed Monday night at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

A riveting new one-minute teaser for the series was released on Monday, revealing glimpses of what’s to come and confirming that April showers will also bring April zombies (one assumes that in the world of The Last of Us, 

“The White Lotus” Season 3 Trailer Unveils a Starry Cast on a Dark Path in Thailand

The first trailer for The White Lotus season 3 has arrived, with the season set in Thailand, where the titular global resort chain offers its guests the kind of peace they so sorely lack in their daily lives. Mike White’s beloved satire returns to HBO this February, with one returning cast member from the first season (Natasha Rothwell) and another killer ensemble.

The new season’s guests include a girl’s trip trio (Leslie Bibb as Kate,

“Dune: Prophecy” Editors Amelia Allwarden and Anna Hauger on Weaving the Tapestry of Sisterhood’s Growing Power

No strangers to collaborating on world-building, editors Amelia Allwarden and Anna Hauger relished the chance to come together to help shape Dune: Prophecy.

The Westworld alums shaped the season finale together, as well as overseeing their own episodes of the HBO magisterial new series that extends the world of Dune set into motion by director Denis Villeneuve’s critically acclaimed films. Set long before Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) was rising to power in the desert sands of Arrakis,

“Game of Thrones” Prequel, “The White Lotus” Season 3 & More Coming to HBO in 2025

Before viewers can return to Westeros, they’ll have a slightly posher option—to check into The White Lotus for season three of Mike White’s biting, hysterical comedy on HBO.

During a tech and media conference on Tuesday night, Warner Bros. Discovery global streaming chief JB Perrette revealed some key release dates for some of HBO’s biggest titles in 2025. The White Lotus has a planned February 2025 release date, while another critically acclaimed series,

“The Penguin” Hair Department Head Brian Badie on Styling Gotham’s Gruesome Twosome

Spoiler warning…

The Penguin capped its remarkable eight-part run this past Sunday night and accomplished a rare feat—it’s a series set in a comic book world, boasting characters well known to the genre’s most read-in fans, that delivered a profoundly satisfying drama for a person unfamiliar with DC Comics or unenthused by Gotham’s most iconic resident, Bruce Wayne. The Penguin doesn’t even whisper Batman’s name nor allude to his presence until the very last shot in the series (a bat-signal,

“The Last of Us” Season Two’s Premiere Date Coming Soon-Ish

With HBO’s fantastic eight-part miniseries The Penguin drawing to a close this past Sunday, we got a fresh update on when one of HBO’s other fantastic series returns, the Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey-led The Last of Us. We’ve known for a while HBO’s first big swing out of the gate in 2025 is the expansion of the world of Dune, recently reinvigorated by Denis Villeneuve’s two films in the upcoming series Dune: Prophecy,

“The Penguin” Costume Designer Helen Huang on Gotham’s Gritty Glamour

Costume designer Helen Huang bridges reality and comic book storytelling in The Penguin, finding a brilliant balance that gives the series weight and a churlish glamour befitting a story set in Gotham’s criminal underworld.  The hit series led by showrunner Lauren LeFranc is familiar—Gotham is our most explored comic version of New York City—yet heightened and deliciously detailed, blending a tactical mob story with the haunting metropolis in a period of rapid decay following the Riddler’s bombing and flooding of the city at the end of The Batman—The Penguin is set in that tragedy’s aftermath.

James Gunn Reveals the Wild First Trailer for “Creature Commands”

James Gunn had a lot to share New York Comic Con, and arguably the biggest news also included a fun first trailer. That would be for Gunn’s new-look DC Studios’ animated series Creature Commandos, a seven-episode Max original written and executive produced by Gunn, which tracks a secret team of incarcerated monsters recruited for the world’s most dangerous missions. These Creature Commandos are “your last, worst option,” according to the series logline.

Taking the stage at the Con on Saturday,

Official “Dune: Prophecy” Trailer Unveils a Powerful Sisterhood Rising in a Troubled Universe

The official Dune: Prophecy trailer has revealed the expansion of the Dune universe that Denis Villeneuve has reinvigorated in his two masterful films. Prophecy, however, is set 10,000 years before the events depicted in Villeneuve’s films, long before Paul Atreides was leading a rebellion of Fremen against House Harkonnen and eventually the rest of the craven galactic Houses looking to enrich themselves from the resources on Arrakis. Yet that dangerous desert planet,

“The Penguin” Episode 4 Introduced a Classic Batman Villain

In the first three episodes of HBO’s devilishly entertaining The Penguin, Colin Farrell’s Oz Cobb has made daring, painful inroads with Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti), the daughter of the late Gotham underworld poobah Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong). As the series kicked off in the wake of the Riddler’s attack on Gotham in Matt Reeves’ feature The Batman, Sofia was freshly sprung from Arkham Asylum, where she spent a decade after being accused of the murder of seven women working at her father’s Iceberg Lounge,

“Casting Director Jennifer Venditti’s Intuitive Touch in “The Sympathizer”

Casting director Jennifer Venditti had one of Hollywood’s great chameleons to work with when she was putting together the pieces for HBO’s limited series The Sympathizer. Robert Downey Jr. plays a quartet of characters in Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar’s adaptation of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as the Oscar-winning performer is in a constant swirl of dramatic action among performers less well-known but all of them entirely game.

Inside the Shaky Alliance Between Oz and Sofia in “The Penguin” Episode 3

Gotham has never looked quite so seedy and dangerous as it does in HBO’s excellent The Batman spinoff series The Penguin. Shot in and around New York City (unlike previous films in the Batman universe, which have utilized international locations and cities that are not New York to recreate Gotham), The Penguin picks up in the aftermath of the Riddler’s bombing of the city at the end of The Batman,

“The Last of Us” Season 2 Unveils Haunting, Taut New Trailer

We’ve got our first look at The Last of Us season 2, and it’s a taut, tense glimpse at one of television’s most compelling series next move. The trailer opens with Pedro Pascal’s Joel Miller and newcomer Catherine O’Hara as the two sit for what appears to be a therapy session. Heaven knows Joel needs it—the last time we saw him, he was seeing red in a brutal, vengeful bloodbath at a hospital where his charge,

Eye on the Emmys: “True Detective: Night Country” Writer/Director Issa López Delivers a Chilling New Season

*Ahead of the 2024 Emmy Awards on September 15, we’re looking back at our interviews with some of this year’s nominees. Issa Lopez notched three nominations this year—for Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing (for episode 6.) 

Issa López loves to challenge herself. The writer/director, best known for the mystical 2017 feature Tigers Are Not Afraid, believes your comfort zone is the last place to find stories worth telling.

First “Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos” Trailer Unveils the Making of a Mob Masterpiece

Bada bing—the first trailer for Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos has arrived.

Gibney, the director behind previous stellar HBO docs Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief and The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, sets his sights on one of the most beloved television series of all time, a bonafide cultural phenomenon that ushered in a new era of darker,