• By MuggleNet Editorial Staff
• 19 Sep, 2026
• Latest

One of the most recognizable parts of Harry Potter is something you don’t actually see.

A few notes of “Hedwig’s Theme” are enough to make you feel like you’re at Hogwarts almost instantly, which means Hans Zimmer and the team composing the music for HBO’s Harry Potter series have a difficult job ahead of them. How do you create a new musical language for the Wizarding World when John Williams’s original one has been lodged in our heads for 25 years?

According to Zimmer, the answer is not to try to compete with it.

Speaking with Collider, Zimmer addressed the challenge of following Williams and made it clear that the new series will pursue its own musical identity. “I can’t write like John Williams,” Zimmer said, adding that his priority is to “try to be original.”

Zimmer Has Faced This Problem Before

Oddly enough, Harry Potter is not Zimmer’s first time inheriting a franchise whose musical identity had already been shaped by Williams.

Zimmer composed the score for 2013’s Man of Steel, decades after Williams created the music for Christopher Reeve’s Superman. Zimmer told Collider that Williams’s work initially made the assignment intimidating, and he struggled with how to approach a character so closely associated with another composer’s music.

Director Zack Snyder eventually helped him get past that pressure by encouraging him to treat the project simply as another movie rather than an attempt to measure himself against Williams. Zimmer ultimately created a completely different musical identity for that incarnation of Superman. It appears he is bringing a similar philosophy to Hogwarts.

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When HBO announced Zimmer and Bleeding Fingers Music as the composers of Harry Potter in January, Zimmer, Kara Talve, and Anže Rozman acknowledged the enormous musical history attached to the series and said they hoped their work would respect what had come before.

The latest comments help clarify what that respect may look like: not attempting to write another John Williams score, but giving this version of the story music that can stand on its own.

That Does Not Necessarily Mean Goodbye to “Hedwig’s Theme”

Zimmer has said that he wants to stay away from imitating Williams’s style and create something original. He has not, at least so far, explicitly said that the television series will never use “Hedwig’s Theme” or any other piece of music from the films.

That may sound like we’re splitting hairs, but there is a difference between building the series around a completely new score and occasionally incorporating an established musical motif. Until HBO or the composers say otherwise, we would not pack away those celesta notes just yet.

What is clear is that the series will not simply be receiving a new variation on Williams’s original soundtrack.

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Williams composed the scores for the first three Harry Potter films, including the music that established many of the sounds audiences still associate most strongly with the Wizarding World. “Hedwig’s Theme” continued to appear throughout all eight movies even after Williams left the series.

And Harry Potter has already proven that the Wizarding World does not have to sound exactly the same under every composer. Patrick Doyle scored Goblet of Fire, Nicholas Hooper took over for Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince, and Alexandre Desplat composed the music for both Deathly Hallows films. Beyond the movies, Chuck E. Myers “Sea,” J Scott Rakozy, and Peter Murray composed the score for Hogwarts Legacy, while Imogen Heap gave Harry Potter and the Cursed Child its distinctive musical identity onstage. Each brought something different while working within a world whose musical foundations had already been established.

A New Sound for a New Hogwarts

Much of what we have seen from the series so far is deliberately recognizable: Hogwarts is still Hogwarts, the Great Hall still feels like the Great Hall, and plenty of familiar imagery appeared throughout the trailers. They certainly all look different to the movies in many regards, but familiar to the books. Music gives the production another way to establish that this is a separate interpretation of the books rather than simply an extended version of the films.

We also have not heard very much of what that musical identity will actually be. Neither trailer have used Zimmer’s score yet. So for all the discussion about what the new Harry Potter looks like, one of the biggest pieces has yet to be revealed.

Zimmer certainly has experience creating themes that become inseparable from the worlds they accompany, from The Lion King and Gladiator to The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, and Dune. And now, Harry Potter.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is set to debut on HBO and HBO Max at Christmas 2026.