HARRY POTTER Cast Was Pitched a WIZARD OF OZ Remake With Daniel Radciffe as a Karate-Kicking Cowardly Lion
Every actor has at least one wild pitch story tucked away in their career history, and Daniel Radcliffe just shared one that sounds like it came straight out of an alternate universe.
While appearing on Hot Ones, Radcliffe revealed that during the height of the Harry Potter craze, someone tried to launch a remake of Wizard of Oz starring him, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, and yes, it gets weird.
According to Radcliffe, the idea surfaced when the Potter films were dominating pop culture. The pitch was to reunite the trio in a reimagined trip to Oz, with Watson playing Dorothy. Radcliffe recalled:
“One of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard, during Potter, somebody came to us and I think asked, like they wanted to cast all three of us, me, Emma and Rupert, in a remake of ‘Wizard of Oz,’ where Emma was Dorothy.
He continued: “I can’t remember what Rupert was, and I just remember that I was gonna be the lion but also he knew karate.”
If that visual alone didn’t stop you in your tracks, Radcliffe doubled down with more details about his proposed role.
“I was like a karate kicking cowardly lion,” he continued. “And I remember I was like 14 or 15 and I was like, ‘I don’t know a lot about the world, but this is a bad idea and it should not be made.'”
A karate kicking Cowardly Lion. Somewhere over the rainbow, someone was clearly throwing genre darts at a board.
Thankfully, the project obviously never materialized, and honestly, it’s hard to imagine it surviving past the concept phase. Hollywood did attempt to revisit Oz years later with Oz the Great and Powerful, directed by Sam Raimi and starring James Franco alongside Mila Kunis, Michelle Williams, and Rachel Weisz.
That 2013 prequel pulled in close to $500 million worldwide. More recently, the Wicked films hit theaters in 2024 and 2025 and pulled off a massive $1.2 billion combined global haul, proving there’s still serious power in those ruby slippers when handled the right way.
As for Radcliffe, his only on-screen collaboration with Watson and Grint remains the eight Harry Potter films released between 2001 and 2011. The trio reunited years later for the nostalgic special Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, which streamed on HBO Max in January 2022, but they’ve never teamed up for another fictional adventure.
It’s fun to imagine what that bizarre Oz remake might’ve looked like, but Radcliffe clearly had the right instinct even as a teenager.
You can check out Radcliffe’s full Hot Ones interview to hear the story straight from him.