“Fantastic Beasts” to be five-film franchise
The ever-expanding “Harry Potter” universe just got larger.
The “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” spinoff will be a five-film franchise, JK Rowling said at a Warner Bros. fan event in London on Thursday.
“We always knew that it was going to be more than one movie — we knew that from the start — so we set a trilogy as a sort of placeholder, because we knew there would be more than one movie,” Rowling said at the Empire Theatre in London. “But I've now done the plotting properly, so we're pretty sure it's going to be five movies.”
Rowling wrote the screenplay for “Fantastic Beasts”, which marks her first script. “So I learned how to write a screenplay while writing a screenplay.” she added. “I wouldn't recommend it.”
The London event also drew stars Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol and Dan Fogler, director David Yates, and producer David Heyman. Colin Farrell and Jon Voight, meanwhile, attended the fan event in Los Angeles. The global event was streamed via satellite to gatherings in New York, London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Rome.
Oscar-winner Redmayne stars as Newt Scamander in the films.
Warner Bros. Pictures had announced in August that a second movie in the “Fantastic Beasts” series was already in the works. Yates is also directing the sequel from a script by Rowling. Yates teased on Thursday that the second film will take place in another global capital city — not the upcoming film's New York City setting. “It will be very different,” Yates, who directed the final four “Harry Potter” films, added.
Following Rowling's revelation about the five films, attendees at the fan event were shown footage from the first 10 minutes of “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”, which opens with investigators tracking the unseen beasts in the countryside, followed by a variety of headlines from 1926 papers and references to the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
Yates also said the upcoming film, which hits theatres November 18, will feature a cameo by a young Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grendelwald — characters from the original “Harry Potter” movies.
Source: Variety