‘Fantastic Beasts’ keeps the Potter magic alive

LOS ANGELES: The second movie in the Harry Potter spinoff series Fantastic Beasts will be released in November 2018, Warner Bros has said, promising “much more on the horizon” from the boy-wizard franchise.

JK Rowling will write the script for the second movie as she did for the first and David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, will direct.

The movie, yet to be titled, is part of a three- movie deal based on Rowling’s book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a prequel to her best-selling Harry Potter books. The first movie, starring Eddie Redmayne, will be released in November.

Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a “magizoologist” who arrives in New York in 1926 with a case of magical creatures that escape, wreak havoc and face threats from the non-magical humans in the city.

Yates hintedthat a familiar character from the Harry Potter stories will return in Fantastic Beasts.

“There is a mention of some characters that we know and love from previous movies, but we only talk about them fleetingly,” Yates said.

“In the next movie, part two, we’ll get to meet one of them in a significant way. He’s much younger than he used to be, but he’ll be coming back.”

In June, Yates said Rowling already had ideas for the third film and said he relished not having to adapt the new stories from books.

“We’d always have to leave out things you hated leaving out because they didn’t quite work in the structure of the storytelling for the movie,” he said.

“P o t t e r mani a ” retur ned with a vengeance in recent weeks, with rave reviews for the London stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and publication of the play script in book form.

US and British booksellers said the book was already the best-selling title in a decade.

Warner Bros, without giving details, hinted “there is much more on the horizon” from Rowling’s Wizarding World. – Reuters

JK Rowling