Fantastic Beasts Film Series Expands to Five Movies

The much anticipated Harry Potter spin-off film, Fantastic Beasts, just got even more enchanted and fantastic! The Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them spinoff will be a five-film franchise, J.K. Rowling confirmed at a Warner Bros promotional event in London’s Leicester Square recently.

The first movie of the series marks J.K. Rowling’s debut as a screenwriter and will be released on 16 November 2016. Rowling said she was “pretty sure” the story would unfold over five films. "We were doing some script sessions the other day, and I can tell you that we always knew it was going to be more than one movie," she teased. "We said a trilogy as a kind of placeholder, but I've now done the plotting properly and we're pretty sure it's going to be five movies."

But you have to wonder how in the world is Warner Bros. going to stretch the franchise across five movies. A trilogy makes sense – it’s concise and you pretty much expect every big fantasy film to spawn sequels. According to Rowling, the first sequel to Fantastic Beasts won’t take place in New York. Apparently, all these films have their own arcs and storylines.

If you aren’t sure what Fantastic Beasts is about: Eddie Redmayne plays the part of the animal-loving Newt Scamander, who visits New York’s secret community of witches and wizards. The film is set 70 years before Harry Potter reads his book in the Hogwarts school. Redmayne, 34, said the author "has the most extraordinary imagination of our generation and she has created something entirely different. That world is spilling out of her head in a unique way."

David Yates – who directed the final four Harry Potter films – directed the first film and is due to return for the confirmed sequel. Attendees at the Facebook fan event were shown footage from the first 10 minutes of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which opens with investigators tracking the hidden beasts in the countryside followed by a variety of headlines from 1926's papers including "Is Anyone Safe?" and references to the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.

The sequel will be released worldwide on November 16th, 2018, while the third movie will make its debut on November 20th, 2020.