FANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM to be first of five movies

Posted on October 14, 2016

3 min read

Well the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them is releasing later this year and rightly has all Potter fans quite excited about it. It turns out though, that fans may need to multiply their excitement. A further five times to be exact, as creator JK Rowling has just announced that they are planning on making the prequel not just one movie, but five. If you thought news about turning the stage play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” into a trilogy was a little too much, then you might well be fuming at this one. Someone at Warner Bros is clearly saying “ka-ching”.

“I can say one thing, we were doing some script sessions the other day and we always knew it was going to be one movie. We always knew that from the start. We said a trilogy as a placeholder because we knew there would be more than one movie. Now I think we can say, I’ve done the plotting properly so we’re pretty sure it’s going to be five movies.”

Now to be fair, these movies may all turn out to be brilliant, but if The Hobbit films taught us anything, it’s not to get our hopes up about it. More is not necessarily always better. I have enjoyed the trailers released for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts fill so far, however as someone who hasn’t even watched all the HP movies, I’m not sure if I can commit myself to all five of these either.

For many people though, they would want to know what character can have five movies devoted to them that will delight fans as much as Harry did. And the answer is not Newton Scamandar (played by Eddie Redmayne), the lead character of Fantastic Beasts, but another character that is actually probably just as popular as Harry already: Professor Dumbledore.

Rowling made the announcement as part of a global fan event broadcast across the world, and mentioned that the five films will feature a young Albus Dumbledore and his nemesis, the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. Now, they might not be major characters in these movies, but they are part of the story and I’m pretty certain that we will see an increasing focus on this story as the series plays out.

Now, if you read that statement correctly it means that Dumbledore and Grindelwald are already in the latest movie, which is surprising considering it takes place in the US and not their native UK and that we have not heard anything about the casting of the characters. So, I guess that leads to the only obvious question, who is playing the young Albus Dumbledore?

What also makes this news particularly significant is that Rowling has previously said that Dumbledore, future headmaster of Hogwarts, was gay – and in love with Grindelwald, his supposed nemesis. Though I doubt we will be seeing a Brokeback Mountain style movie coming into the works, that would certainly make for a different story than previous films, if they choose to pursue it and would also be interesting to see how fans would react to it. And of course, if the issue is never addressed fans will be even more upset, so they would kind of have to tackle the topic in these films.

It’s a decision that I have no doubt will make the studio lots of money though and with a generation practically having grown up on Harry Potter and viewing it the same way many of us view Star Wars, I can only see people getting more excited over the news. We will have to see though if extending the story so much will actually ruin it for fans or not.

At the fan event, a new featurette was also released which you can view below: