The Harry Potter money train just can’t stop won’t stop, even if we beg it to really, really hard.
According to Deadline, Warner Bros. has greenlit the third Fantastic Beasts movie in the spinoff series. The film begins production in spring 2020 with an eye on a November 2021 release.
In this upcoming film, apparently, Jessica Williams, who was featured briefly in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, will have a “bigger role this time.” Considering that her character existed for literally two seconds, I think just having one scene would be a “bigger role.” Williams in the films plays Professor Eulalie “Lally” Hicks, a teacher at Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the American equivalent of Hogwarts.
The entire cast will be returning, including Johnny Depp as Grindelwald because they are determined to die on that hill. Eddie Redmayne as Newt Scamander, Jude Law as Albus Dumbledore, Ezra Miller, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler, and Katherine Waterston will all be coming back as well. The third film will be set in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
I wish I could care about the Fantastic Beasts franchise, but I think it proved with its second installment that J.K. Rowling, while talented, is limited in her world-building. She doesn’t really understand American politics or history enough to touch on things that would be relevant in this time period in America, and despite her attempting to create more diversity, she has inadvertently created some of the most accidentally racist characters I’ve seen in quite some time. Not to mention her own mistakes when it comes to the timeline of her own world.
All I wanted from Rowling post-Harry Potter was an Encylopedia of Magic and even that, in the form of Pottermore, has delivered mixed results. Part of why I’m nervous about Fantastic Beasts 3 going to Brazil is because of Castelobruxo.
Back in 2016, Rowling wrote about the South American Magical School Castelobruxo that takes in all magical students in South America … even though it’s in Brazil. The depiction of it just came off as really “exotic” with no real understanding of the complexities of South American culture, but more wanting the aesthetic of a magical school in the rainforest.
I hope that in this third movie Rowling works with someone who knows screenwriting because take all the problematic elements out of it, the storytelling in Grindelwald was its weakest link. There was so much exposition and plot coincidences that it just made an already meh movie seem incompetent on top of everything else.
Well, three down, two more to go. I hope we stop Grindelwald in a way that’s interesting, even though we already know he doesn’t die because it is in the original series, and there really aren’t any stakes to these films because they aren’t telling us anything we don’t already know.
(via Deadline, image: Warner Bros.)
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Published: Nov 5, 2019 11:31 am