Warner Bros. may have all hands at the pump in anticipation of Justice League – November 17th is the date for your diaries – but it appears the studio is now beginning to make preparations for another fantasy-fuelled epic: Fantastic Beasts 2.
Pegged to arrive late next year, the Harry Potter spinoff has bolstered its ranks quite considerably over the past few months, adding Jude Law (the young Albus Dumbledore) and Wolf Roth as a character called Spielman, along with Victoria Yeates, Derek Riddell and Brontis Jodorowsky (El Topo, Endless Poetry), the latter of whom is attached to play Nicolas Flamel.
That’s a character who will be overly familiar to Potterheads, given his instrumental, if indirect role in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. If you’re in need of a history lesson, Flamel was the alchemist who discovered the elusive Elixir of Life, which would later fall into the hands of Quirinus Quirrell, a two-faced pawn of Voldemort.
Exactly how he filters into the story of Fantastic Beasts 2 is anyone’s guess at this point, but with a big reveal expected tomorrow, November 16th, Warner Bros. posted the following image of two wands – wands belonging to Dumbledore and his arch-rival, Gellert Grindelwald.
Featuring a screenplay penned by J.K. Rowling, the so-far untitled Fantastic Beasts 2 opens in 1927, just as Grindelwald slips beneath Newt’s nose and begins to gather more followers to his cause – elevating wizards above all non-magical beings.
It’s a remarkably exciting setup for Warner’s second prequel, and we expect tomorrow to herald one of two things: the official title of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2, or a fleeting teaser designed to introduce Newt’s sophomore adventure. There’s always a small chance that WB will decide to drop both, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on the announcement one way or another.
Fantastic Beasts 2 will see a release on November 16th, 2018, and when it does, most of David Yates’ sequel will unfold in Paris.