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.
