Warner Bros. put a franchise-freezing spell on Fantastic Beasts
Director David Yates says the studio has “parked” the series
Aux News Warner Bros
As we all assumed by now, there will be no justice for the victims of The Crimes Of Grindelwald. Between the dismal box office of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore and J.K. Rowling’s neverending attacks on trans people, the Harry Potter prequel series the world was clamoring for in 2016 is one of several zombie franchises trudging around Hollywood awaiting $200 million to continue. (And we haven’t begun to discuss the series cursed casting decisions). Unfortunately for the person still hoping Newt Scamander will cast the right spell and turn this increasingly unnecessary series around, it will be some time before we find out where to find those fantastic beasts. Director David Yates says the movie is “parked.”
“With Beasts for a minute, it’s all just parked,” Yates told the Inside Total Film podcast (via The Hollywood Reporter). “We got to the end of [2022’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore], and we’re all so proud of that movie, and when it went out into the world, we just needed to sort of stop and pause and take it easy.”
The news must’ve been difficult for Yates, who is promoting his new Netflix pharma satire Pain Hustlers and has directed seven Wizard Worlds movies thus far. However, it sounds like he even could use a break from J.K. Rowling, who we imagine is just as lovely in real life as she is on Twitter. Just kidding, in 2016, she went off script and “just mentioned” a gargantuan five-film Fantastic Beasts series. It was a “total surprise” to Yates.
“[J.K Rowling] just mentioned it spontaneously, at a press screening once,” he said. “We were presenting some clips of FB1. We’d all signed up for FB1, very enthusiastically. And Jo, bless her, came on and said, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s five of them.’ We all looked at each other—because no one had told us there were going to be five. We’d committed to this one. So that was the first we’d heard of it.”
It’s all a cold splash of water for Yates, who has made quite a career out of directing thespians holding sticks. Never fear—there’s a Harry Potter TV series coming to Max that he’d be perfect for.
39 Comments
I’m not a Redmayne fan and I didn’t think watching him play an awkward zookeeper appealing to mythology nerds would go over for very long and everyone is just tired of the franchise. I still think a series about Aurors would have been more successful with American audiences.. The violence is built in.
He’s beyond unwatchable in the first movie. Absolutely every word out of his mouth is like sandpaper to your eyeballs and earballs
I don’t know why I’m annoyed by him. It’s weird.
Agreed. But he’s amazing in Jupiter Ascending.
He plays Newt like someone who’s autistic, and possibly ace, and when someone asks him if that was a deliberate acting choice, Redmayne responds no, he was just going for awkward nerd. I dunno if Eddie’s just a bad actor or if this was a failure on the writers/director to properly characterise Newt, but it adds an extra layer of awkwardness to the character that doesn’t need to be there.
I can only remember the first 20 minutes of the movie, if that. I just didn’t find it compelling. Maybe she should have tried for a tv series. Creators seem to have more freedom (and time) to futz around with plots and characters without entirely losing an audience.
“Old timey magical naturalist and his global adventures that lead him to write a famous book” actually could have gone over well. Never the juggernaut that the original Potter series was, but that is a pretty good set up especially for an established and well loved IP that had tons of fans wanting more exploration. They just…didn’t even stick to their own premise for a single movie, making it a prequel that explains everything that impacted the previous series.
Audiences could certainly use some lighthearted fantasy fare. It sounds like the plot and focus got out of control. I was alert to the ‘buzz’ around productions and all of the talk; it sounds like Newt and his magical pals got lost in all of the Grindelwalk and Dumbledore drama. Personally, after Deathly Hallows, I’d had enough of all the scheming and drama.
Yeah no shit. The fact HBO wants a franchise restart is kinda a large hint these films are dead alongside smaller box office returns.
Once HBO announced the Harry Potter TV series, the writing was on the wall that the Fantastic Beasts franchise is done. I suppose they could do a novel to finish Newt’s story.
yates is a perfectly competent, but dull director. awful for the potter flicks. zero whimsy or magic
I think Warner Brothers made a mistake in having him direct the final four Harry Potter films. They were doing so well after the one-two punch of Cuaron’s Azkaban and Mike Newell’s Goblet of Fire – one a franchise-defining work by an actual genius, the other a solidly crafted coming-of-age whodunit. I wish they had continued in that direction and offered each of the final Potters to a respected auteur, so that the films played out almost like a television anthology series with each director bringing his or her unique stamp to the films. Imagine Order of the Phoenix directed by Richard Linklater or Deathly Hallows, Part 01 directed by Terrence Malick. It would have been riskier, but better.
OotP was my favorite of the books, I was so pumped for the movie. I remember liking the choice to make Dudley and his crew full-on Chavs at the start of the movie and then as it went on just wondering why it felt so…inert? No spark, no fun, just a very workmanlike “Well let’s make this damn movie and get it over with” feel to the whole affair. I was checked out after that and only caught the last three on HBO in bits and pieces. Bringing Yates back again (and again…) wasn’t the only thing that killed my enthusiasm for the movies, but it sure didn’t help.
Order of the Phoenix was my favorite of the books as well, and I think it almost works as a movie if you can forget that the book exists, but as a work of adaptation it pales beside the original’s immersive feel and Dickensian plotting.
Phoenix makes almost no sense if you haven’t read the book. I was super pumped when the trailer dropped, but the final result was disappointing. I wanted to see magical brains eating Ron’s face!That and Kreacher was barely in it, and only because Rowling told Yates the elf would matter later on.The only Yates film with any flair is Half-Blood, and that’s mostly because of the series-best cinematography.
I find HBP really annoying to watch because almost the whole thing has an awful sepia filter over it, like the post-production was done on Instagram. Some of the scenes are so yellow and fuzzy I feel like I’m watching it through a pair of glasses smeared with butter.
It was certainly a choice, but at least it was something other than the pedestrian cinematography of the rest of the non-Cuaron series.
The entire Department of Mysteries sequence is basically written as a big movie SFX action setpiece – Flying brains! A Death Eater’s head constantly aging, growing and shrinking, from baby to old man and back! – and none of it made the screen.Then there’s Sirius’ death which…what makes it interesting and memorable on the page is that it’s not Avada Kedavra that gets him, it’s The Veil. He gets hit with a stunner, takes a step backwards through the archway, and then he’s gone – and the reader realizes where exactly that door goes. But for the slower viewers in the audience, we’re making it an explicit murder (And also, for Gary Oldman’s sake as an actor, we’re completely changing how the killing curse works so that he can take a moment to process “Alas, I’ve been shot!” and play out a death scene.)
Yeah, I always hated that he gets Avada-ed and yet stands there, staggering for a few moments. The curse has never worked that way in any other moment in even the film series. Voldemort’s battle with Dumbledore was super fun, but they should have made it longer. Each gets a few hits in and then it’s done.
We could have had a Tarantino-directed one where he does a cameo drinking butterbeer off Maggie Smith’s feet in the Three Broomsticks Bar. Total missed opportunity.
This woman could have happily lived off the billions her first seven books/8 movie deals made for her but she just had to keep squeezing that apple. I’m sure she’s crying herself to sleep on top of her huge piles of money-stuffed pillows.
Isn’t she killing it with CB Strike anyway? 7 books and 5 seasons of TV.
They sold the first movie as an exciting new adventure in the world of Harry Potter…and then The Notorious TERF decided she wanted her very own Star Wars Prequel TrilogyPentology. So many misbegotten choices at every turn, I’d love for somebody to compile a tell-all history of how we went from “It’s the 1920s and a clumsy nerd wizard just let loose an entire menagerie of magical whatsits in New York!” to…a movie where a major plot point involves the hero’s love interest accidentally killing the wrong baby (when she was actually just trying to, uh, kind-of kidnap another baby? Also we’re going to establish that wizards had ample foreknowledge of World War II/The Holocaust and they let it happen.)
Oh wow, glad I stopped paying any attention after the first, sort-of OK movie.
Let’s not forget that the entire plot of the third movie hinges on the outcome of an election that is decided, not by voting, but by a magical deer.
Well you had to have a magic deer because, for some reason, we’re sticking with the “Fantastic Beasts” concept/branding even though it was obvious by the end of the first movie that nobody involved with the conception of the thing actually gave a damn about that part.
Also we’re going to establish that wizards had ample foreknowledge of World War II/The Holocaust and they let it happen.I’m not an expert on this franchise, but doesn’t that kinda track? I seem to recall that the wizards are mostly fucking awful and talk a lot about blood purity. Isn’t Ron’s dad an outlier because he thinks humans are ok and like, bothers to learn what a telephone is?
What if I told you the wizard revealing this grim vision of the (actual) future was the villain, trying to convince others to join his crusade for wizard supremacy and global domination
I think the main problem is that “the world of Harry Potter” is kind of shitty as a world.It’s fine as a thin backdrop to the story of Harry Potter himself, and Hogwarts is the best fleshed out bit of it. But once you get past that, you quickly realize that not only did Rowling half-ass her world building, she did it in ways that are near impossible to fix.
The Wizarding World is vast enough to support a global economy, but also the entire UK magic community is basically the size of the EastEnders cast.
Let’s also remember, the actress who spoke up for trans rights was sidelined and removed from the marketing and removed almost completely from the movie.Potter fans ignore the transphobia but its clear its part of the deal with WB and JKR. Either you play up a “both sides” and say “Oh no leave poor Joanne alone, you meanies,” or agree with her outright or you get fired.Not to mention, even if she wasn’t a hateful bigot and misogynist, the reality is these movies have zero of the charm that made the original so much fun for young readers. Its not about kids nor is it about Hogwarts and navigating the world of adults as a child and finding out the many mysteries behind the scenes, making friends, dealing with enemies, finding autonomy, finding purpose, etc.Instead its just a lazy monomyth story about middle-age men fighting other middle-aged men. It could not be farther from what made the original such a success. HP has always been a kids & teen series, and removing it from that world was disastrous.
I always figured Katherine Waterston extracted herself from the third movie, calling her agent and saying “Hey, I’ve got an okay career going, this franchise is a sinking ship and I’m sick of putting up with That Woman; can you get me out of this contract?”
Perhaps nobody wants to see Eddie Redmayne’s weird-ass face filling up a movie screen.
Redmayne’s face on my screen was the best part of those movies. Not a high bar, but still
“We got to the end of [2022’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore], and we’re all so proud of that movie, and when it went out into the world, we just needed to sort of stop and pause and take it easy.”Sure, that’s what happened.
And then we had to destroy it, because it was too perfect and we were too proud of it!
I’m glad they are finally putting this series out of our misery. I had the misfortune of watching the second one at home on a rainy Saturday afternoon. What a dreary, drab, lifeless, incoherent mess. These film make the “Hobbit” trilogy look great in comparison.
Remember when the 2nd movie had a convoluted murder mystery (not to mention the white guy assaulting a mind controlled black woman… ugh) involving a baby that took up 1/2 the movie and yet had ZERO relevance to the plot whatsoever.
Yates would not be perfect for the series. He’s a middling director who botched Order of the Phoenix, lucked out that Bruno Delbonnel shot Half-Blood, and didn’t have to make hard choices by keeping nearly all of the content of Deathly Hallows across two films. (And even that had some boneheaded changes.)The Fantastic Beasts series would have been 1,000 times better if they brought back Cuaron or somehow nabbed del Toro. And also if Rowling didn’t write scripts.No, please hire better talent for the series.