There was a time when fan fiction meant furtive scribbles uploaded to shadowy corners of the internet, in which Mr Darcy was recast as a moody vampire flatmate, Captain Kirk discovered his inner romantic, or Gandalf finally got around to opening an artisanal shop in the Shire. It was an underground hobby that could never trouble Tinseltown’s accountants. And yet here we are in 2025, with the news in the Hollywood Reporter that Legendary Pictures has just paid at least $3m – (£2.2m) – an unprecedented amount – for the screen rights to a forthcoming novel called Alchemised that began life as an unauthorised and kinky Harry Potter spin-off.
The backstory behind Alchemised, by SenLinYu, sounds pretty freaky. SenLinYu’s original book, titled Manacled, inhabited a strange sub-niche of Potterverse named “Dramione” in which Hermione Granger finds herself regularly involved in unlikely and transgressive romantic encounters with Draco Malfoy. Now stripped of all reference to Hogwarts, butterbeer and Nimbus 2000s, and with renamed characters, Alchemised will hit shelves and online bookstores later this month as the dark fantasy tale of a young woman with memory problems who finds herself at the mercy of a powerful and cruel necromancer.
As well as Alchemised, The Love Hypothesis is heading to cinemas, with Lili Reinhart as a PhD candidate who falls for professor Tom Bateman. If you thought Hermione and Draco were strange bedfellows, this one is based on a subgenre of Star Wars fanfic known as Reylo, which focuses on the forbidden love between Rey and Kylo Ren.
This is not the first time Hollywood has plumbed the depths of fanfic for its next big thing, and there currently looks like no let-up. Where once studios might have relied on pulp novels, classic plays or New Yorker-approved short stories to fill the multiplexes, producers are increasingly turning to Tumblr and Archive of Our Own (AO3). In 2019, Sony Pictures Television signed a first-look deal with Wattpad, the online clearing house that has become a farm system for aspiring authors, to develop scripted series and films from the site’s most popular stories. Wattpad was also the source for the After series, which started out as a cheeky riff on One Direction’s Harry Styles, and miraculously led to five films (some straight-to-streaming) between 2019 and 2023, with more on the way.
Then of course there’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which began life as Twilight fanfic but ended up as a trilogy of films that despite being almost universally rubbished by critics somehow made more than $1.3bn at the global box office. Its success showed studios that provenance didn’t matter: a story could start out as Edward and Bella with the serial numbers filed off, and still become a billion-dollar franchise.
What exactly is the attraction for Hollywood here? The logical answer is that, in a twisted sort of way, all these projects benefit from a kind of brand recognition by proxy. Given the choice, Harry Potter fans would probably prefer to see the real Hermione and Draco enjoying a bout of magically enhanced heavy petting on screen than a reimagined take that wipes away all the wizarding world stuff. But readers of the “original” on AO3 have themselves been part of this strange journey from slash fiction to multiplex, often along with millions of others, and that brings a sense of ownership that studios value hugely.
From a corporate vantage point, all that pre-existing fervour is catnip. Such huge online readerships provide proof of concept without the bother of focus groups or test screenings; it arrives trailing a ready-made, highly motivated community. In a climate where genuinely original scripts are treated like financial landmines, that sort of data means these films look less like a gamble and more like a franchise incubator, one that’s already warmed and fed by the fandom itself.