Warner Bros. has announced the first spinoff movie to come out of the very successful Harry Potter franchise will arrive in theaters on November 18, 2016.
“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first of three spinoff movies to come from the studio and J.K. Rowling, and is part of the studio’s goal to create three movie tales like The Hobbit.
Kevin Tsujihara persuaded Rowling last year to revive the Harry Potter movie magic by adapting her Hogwarts textbook “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” for the big screen. Rowling wrote the 54-page book in 2001 between publication of the fourth and fifth Potter books.
The only thing I know about the adaptation is that the story takes place 70 years before Harry Potter and follows magizoologist Newt Scamander. WB is quick to point out that these new movies are not a prequel, but rather an expansion of the wizardry world.
While fans of Harry Potter are going to be excited about this news, my biggest concern is the idea that all movies must be megamovies that require audiences to see all three in order to appreciate the full story. One of the first movies to do this was Back to the Future II and III that released in 1989 and 1990, and with the success of The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit, it looks like this will be the business model going forward.
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“WB is quick to point out that these new movies are not a prequel, but rather an expansion of the wizardry world.”
That is one of the reasons I’ve been excited for the movie ever since they first announced it months ago. I’ve always hoped there would be some new stories set in the HP setting that had nothing to do with the main cast of the series. Although I was really hoping for more full length novels, I’m not really complaining that we’ll get it in movie form.
At first I thought this was purely a money grab (which is still is), but I’m at least willing to see where this one goes. As this particular book doesn’t have a set narrative for fans to nitpick a part, it could be really interesting, especially set in the 1930s or so. I would imagine it’s broken up by location eg North America in the first, Africa in second, and Asia in third or something.
I think the way of making movies in trilogies filmed at the same time is a good idea. That way you get the same cast throughout, without appreciable aging of the actors (ie., Star Trek original cast movies), the sets match up, there’s no decade-long wait between movies (I’m looking at you, George Lucas) or, as in the case of the Golden Compass, the sequels were never made even though the second movie was a quarter of the way filmed, and, more importantly, the series is guaranteed to be completed. How many movie series have been aborted at a single movie? Buckaroo Banzai, for one, Spacehunter – Adventures in the Forbidden Zone for another, and, as I mentioned, The Golden Compass. Disney abandoned the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe series mid way through – but this may have been a blessing in disguise because the actors aged too much between the movies and in the final one that got filmed, they were trying to pass off young teenaged actors and actresses as preteens without much success. Filming them all at one time would have prevented that.
I admit my opinion is motivated by age. I am nearing sixty, and I appreciate not having to wait five or six years between films, thank you Peter Jackson! If he made the LOTRs and Hobbit films as slowly as George Lucas made Star Wars movies, there would have been a good chance that I would be dead and gone before he was done with the lot.