"Weird Al" Yankovic and Daniel Radcliffe attend the Brooklyn premiere of "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"

Movies

‘Weird Al’ recalls Warner Bros. refused Harry Potter parody request

November 26, 2022

“If I’m doing a franchise, it’s usually better to do it and ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” Yankovic said, recalling the disappointment long before he teamed up with Daniel Radcliffe for “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”

Add “Weird Al” Yankovic to the growing list of performers despised by Warner Bros.’ top brass.

No, the parody musician didn’t have a streaming project caught up in the Discovery merger; his biopic “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” debuted on TIFF in September and is distributed by The Roku Channel. Earlier in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter promoting Eric Appel’s new film, Yankovic lamented one of the many properties he was denied parody rights by a major movie studio. The guilty? Harry Potter.

“Whenever I did, about a decade or two ago, I approached the movie company just to get a general blessing like, ‘Hey, I’d like to do a Harry Potter parody,'” Yankovic recalls “And I think they said no, or they never answered or whatever… But sometimes when you’re dealing with franchises and you ask permission, you know , there are so many people who can say no, and they usually do.”

It’s an ironic anecdote on (at least) two fronts. First, Harry Potter and his soundtrack have been parodied endlessly: appearing in everything from YouTube sensation “Potter Puppet Pals” to Darren Criss and AJ Holmes’ stage production “A Very Potter Musical.” Potter parody is now an oversaturated market, and assuming Yankovic’s timeline is correct, it wasn’t much less crowded back then.

Second, Daniel Radcliffe – Harry Potter himself – would go on to play an enhanced version of Yankovic in “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” The pair struck up a friendship during production with Yankovic helping Radcliffe prepare extensively.

“Honestly, the thing we worked on the most together was the accordion,” Radcliffe told IndieWire at TIFF. “He gave me accordion lessons, which I can take to my grave by then. I don’t need anything else.

“[Yankovic] is so authentically himself and that led to this wonderful film, as well as his incredible career,” Radcliffe continued. “It’s not a movie where we expect you to sit down and take a moral from the story. But if there’s anything to that, it’s about leaning into its own quirkiness. and it is a means of finding one’s own happiness.

It’s a message that Yankovic reiterated again in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “If I’m doing a franchise, it’s usually better to do it and ask for forgiveness rather than permission,” he continued, before joking, “We like to think that [‘Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’] is the latest film in the Harry Potter franchise.

“Maybe that’s what this movie is about,” Radcliffe, also told The Hollywood Reporter. “It was his way of doing a parody of Harry Potter.”

Register: Stay up to date with the latest film and TV news! Sign up for our email newsletters here.