The Harry Potter franchise has finished but fans have turned their attention to making a prequel film about Lord Voldemort, the central main antagonist in J. K. Rowling’s series of Harry Potter novels and films.
“What made Tom Riddle become Voldemort?” a group of Harry Potter fans wondered.
In 2016 the film’s creators had been re-reading the sixth installment of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which left them with a question: “What happened in those years, and what really went down at Hogwarts when he came back? There are some clues in the books which have not been transposed at all in the movies, but a lot goes unspoken.”
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Earlier this year, the group organized as Tryangle Films, set up a Kickstarter page in an attempt to raise funds for their project Voldemort: Origins Of The Heir, which is a film based on Tom Marvolo Riddle’s life before he became Lord Voldemort.
Warner Bros reached an agreement with the film start up Tryangle Films over the unofficial prequel, providing it is only released on YouTube “in a nonprofit way,” according to Polygon.
The group shared a short trailer in June for Voldemort: Origins of the Heir, which quickly gained over 30 million plays on Facebook.
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Now, the full film has arrived for free on YouTube. The 52-minute fan film is based around a new character named Grisha McLaggen, a descendant of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry co-founder Godric Gryffindor.
The story is told in a series of flashbacks as students of Hogwarts investigate the activities of Tom Riddle.
Voldemort: Origins of the Heir currently has over 4 million views on YouTube within two days of its Jan. 13 release. It also sits at number 16 on YouTube’s top trending feed.
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Harry Potter fans took to Twitter to share their reviews of the prequel film about Lord Voldemort.