Why Hollywood Just Paid $3M for a Draco-Hermione Fanfiction

I grew up in the golden age of Dramione fanfiction when the internet was a mess of angsty forums, LiveJournal tags, and a never-ending stream of “enemies to lovers” arcs featuring Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger. If you were there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It was messy, chaotic, addictive, and honestly, just what we all needed back when teen drama came in the form of badly formatted fanfic chapters and clickbait AO3 summaries.

Sure, canon gave us Ron and Hermione, but fanfiction gave us options. Even if you were Team Ron, it was hard to resist the magnetic pull of a snarky, broken Draco falling for the clever Gryffindor girl in secret. It was high school melodrama meets magical warfare like Gossip Girl meets The Half-Blood Prince. We didn’t have the language for it at the time, but Dramione was our soap opera.

So imagine the internet’s collective whiplash when, nearly two decades later, Hollywood throws down $3 million for a Draco x Hermione fanfic. Yes, really.

Meet Alchemised — The $3M Fanfic-Turned-Film

The project in question is Alchemised, a dark fantasy fanfiction-turned-novel by online author SenLinYu, who has long been revered in the Dramione fandom for her complex characters, poetic writing, and mature reinterpretations of the wizarding world.

Now, the story is officially headed to the big screen after Legendary Entertainment snapped up the film rights for a reported $3+ million. The Hollywood Reporter broke the news, calling it one of the most expensive book-to-film adaptation deals in recent memory. Sources say the preemptive bid was designed to crush any competing offers before the title could go to auction.

The exact terms of the deal haven’t been disclosed, but it couldn’t have come at a more strategic time for Legendary. The studio is fresh off a lucrative three-year partnership with Paramount and riding the commercial high of the nearly $1B Minecraft Movie.

Wait, So Is This Still Harry Potter?

Technically… no. Like many high-quality fanfics that made the leap to original publishing, Alchemised was revised to strip out specific Harry Potter IP meaning no Hogwarts, no wands, and no literal Malfoys. But the bones are the same. If you know Dramione, you'll recognize it immediately: brooding blonde anti-hero with family trauma falls for brilliant, principled heroine in a morally gray, high-stakes magical world.

It’s very much a case of “file the serial numbers off and sell the soul” a strategy we've seen before with books like Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fanfiction. And just like that franchise, Alchemised comes with a built-in global audience, particularly from the now-adult millennials who wrote, read, and cried over fanfiction in their teenage bedrooms.

Nostalgia, Profit, and Fandom Power

The internet has had opinions some thrilled, some side-eyeing the cash grab.

Many longtime fans are excited to see fanfiction authors finally getting the recognition (and compensation) they deserve, especially after years of writing for free. Others are more cynical, seeing this as yet another attempt by Hollywood to mine nostalgia for profit, particularly from the over-exploited Potterverse.

And of course, some of us are still in disbelief that the thing we used to read under the covers at 2am is now a seven-figure studio deal.

But one thing’s clear: fanfiction is no longer just fan culture it’s pop culture. Whether it's Netflix shows, Wattpad adaptations, or million-dollar movie rights, the world is finally catching up to something fandom has known for decades: good stories come from passion, not just IP rights

So yes, Hollywood just paid over $3 million for a story born in the Dramione trenches. And if that feels surreal, well… welcome to 2025.