It's easy to see why Warner Bros. would want as much Harry Potter as possible. The original franchise capped off its 8-movie run with nearly $8B totaled up over the years; a remarkable achievement no matter how you slice it. When Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was announced it was to be a prequel trilogy, but why stop at three when more movies equals more $$$.
Today during a Facebook Live Q&A, author and screenwriter J.K. Rowling revealed that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will now be five movies.
“I can say one thing, we were doing some script sessions the other day and we always knew it was going to be one movie. We always knew that from the start. We said a trilogy as a placeholder because we knew there would be more than one movie. Now I think we can say, I’ve done the plotting properly so we’re pretty sure it’s going to be five movies.”
No other details were made available but we can assume Eddie Redmayne will stick around as magizoologist Newt Scamander, who travels to New York some 70 years before the birth of Harry Potter. While there are two more movies that follow, one to debut in 2018 and another in 2020, one has to wonder if the two additional films will stretch far enough that we may see the boy wizard appear?
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opens November 18th. Check out a special IMAX featurette for it below, and assume we'll see the new sequels in 2022 and 2024.
