While discussing how students will continue to be sorted at Hogwarts once the founders have died, Godric Gryffindor removes the hat from his head and the four founders enchant it with their combined intelligence. She will later attend Hogwarts, and be sorted into Ravenclaw House. Salazar Slytherin creates his magical locket, enchanting it so that only a Parseltongue can open it. Rowena Ravenclaw creates her magical diadem, enchanting it to increase the wearer’s intelligence. Helga Hufflepuff creates her magical cup. So take this more as a general guide than an irrefutable, all-inclusive roadmap to the Harry Potter series.

As such, it’s always possible there’s a line or visual clue we missed here and there that would alter one of our listed dates, or a minor event we forgot to include, and of course there are more Fantastic Beasts movies still to come which could - and almost certainly will - alter and add to this timeline. Most of the time, we could use the dates from Wizarding World or the Harry Potter Wiki (many thanks to the folks who help keep both of those sites updated and well sourced) to help fill in the blanks, although sometimes when their dates seemed to conflict with what was presented in the films, we had to take an educated guess. Of course, films don’t tend to hand out a lot of precise dates, so we’ve had to do some investigative work in order to pin down when a lot of these took place. Because it can keep track of ten films worth of story spanning over a century’s worth of events, we’ve put together a detailed timeline of every event that takes place (or is implied to take place, or would’ve had to take place in order for other things to take place) within the Harry Potter movie-verse.

Meanwhile, the Fantastic Beasts films are creating their narrative almost from whole cloth, with characters and storylines that never existed in the Potterverse prior to the films. If you’ve kept up with the films, you know that while the Harry Potter movies stick pretty closely to the books, they do take some liberties here and there. Rowling’s seven Harry Potter novels, and her tales have since spawned theme parks, supplemental literature, a play, countless websites, and of course, the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts film franchises. However, it’s been a long time since Potter lore was contained merely to the pages of J.K. All one had to do in the first few years of Potter-mania was keep up with the books, and you were as well-versed on the Wizarding World as anyone. When the first book in the Harry Potter series, 'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone' (or 'Philosopher’s Stone' if you’re in the U.K.), released back in 1997, it was easy enough to be a Potterhead.

Harry potter in order