The Fantastic beasts franchise would be a new era of Harry Potternow called the Magic world franchise. A predecessor of the Harry Potter series and based on one of the textbooks assigned to Hogwarts students, the franchise follows Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a magical zoologist who specializes in caring for the magical creatures of the wizarding world. What started as a simple spin-off of the Harry Potter franchise quickly turned into a prequel saga with characters like Dumbledore and Grindelwald.
While the first film was a hit with fans and critics alike, things quickly backfired with 2018’s release Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. The third movie, Fantastic Beasts: Dumbledore’s Secrets, was a box office bomb, a first for any movie in the Wizarding World, effectively ending this part of the franchise.
While part of the series’ failure can be linked to author JK Rowling’s controversial statements that the Harry Potter brand, another aspect is the issue in which The Fantastic beasts stories were told. Although released as movies, the story set out would have worked better as a television series, and here’s why.
Fantastic Beasts is wizard Pokémon
When fans first heard the first plot synopsis for Fantastic beasts and where to find themmany commented that the movie sounded very much like one Harry Potter take the pokemon franchise, featuring a person trying to capture a bunch of strange, colorful creatures and trap them in a containment unit that’s bigger on the inside. When the movie came out in 2016 pokemon itself saw a resurgence due to the huge popularity of Pokemon Go.
pokemonhas had movies, of course, but the franchise has mostly thrived in television with the popular anime running for over 25 years and now just ending its historic run. Fantastic beasts since a franchise could have borrowed a similar structure where each episode with Newt Scamander has to track and find a new magical creature while giving the audience time to get to know and understand it, making it feel more like the entries in the fictional textbooks.
The Complicated Potter Lore wouldn’t bog down a TV show
Fantastic beasts and where to find them is a relatively standalone film until Act 3 where it is revealed to be a more straightforward prequel to the Harry Potter franchise, involving the famous dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. The sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald quickly changes the franchise from about the actual beast (and they appear more as an afterthought) to a political thriller set in the Wizarding World. But in the context of a two-hour movie, this leaves the films overcrowded and underdeveloped.
A television series would have allowed the franchise to incorporate some of the wider Wizarding World lore into the series without dominating one storyline. The mystery of Credence’s parentage would have done better teasing about multiple episodes of a long story than one two hour feature film. It would also have allowed the series to dive more into the backstories of some characters that are only casually referenced, like Newt’s history with his brother, or even the complicated history of Dumbledore and Grindelwald, which really has its own long franchise. could have been. .
Why Fantastic Beasts Wasn’t a Series
It’s easy to say this is what Warner Bros. should have done, but it is also important to understand the reality of the situation. Fantastic beasts and where to find them was given the green light in 2014 and the streaming era of television was still in its infancy. While series like House of cards, Orange is the new blackand the resurgence of Arrested development showed that Netflix could become a major player in television, it was still a new format. Warner Bros. didn’t have its own streaming service at this point, and HBO Max didn’t launch until 2020, after two Fantastic beasts movies had been released and the third was filming.
HBO was always an option, as Warner Bros. and HBO were both subsidiaries of Time Warner Entertainment, but at the time the idea came from one Harry Potterrelated series was not the surefire brand extension it is today. In 2014, the idea of a major movie franchise expanding through television was seen as a downgrade and not worth the cost. It is worth noting that while Star Wars had animated series like Star Wars: the Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, a live-action series was canceled at the time because it was deemed too expensive. Meanwhile, the MCU had only just started trying to expand their franchise Agents of SHIELD on ABC, and that was seen as a disappointment by many until the end of season one.
Warner Bros. wanted to keep Harry Potter, a more consistent and reliable brand than even DC’s superheroes at the time, as a movie exclusive and probably also author JK Rowling. That means Rowling was responsible for the story being told, and if she wanted to simplify it Potter prequel showing Dumbledore’s history with Grindelwald probably should have done them instead of grafting it onto the plot of Fantastic beasts; that was her decision, yet one that hurt the series in the long run.