The once mighty Wizarding World of Harry Potter has started looking surprisingly vulnerable. First came Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald underperforming at the box office and receiving negative reviews. That was followed by J.K. Rowling’s transphobic meltdown last year, which saw her widely criticized by Harry Potter stars and fans. On top of that, her decision to support Johnny Depp as Grindelwald looks like a bad call as he lost a court case and was quickly removed from the project. All of which puts Fantastic Beasts 3 on shaky ground.
So, fans likely won’t be happy to learn that the movie is “in trouble” and that it may be reformatted as an HBO Max exclusive rather than receive a theatrical release. The news comes via leaker Daniel Richtman and casts doubt on whether the planned five film arc will be completed, with hints that they’ll wrap up the story in the third instalment. Previous rumors have said that Warner Bros. would prefer Fantastic Beasts 3 to have a “definitive end” as well, which if true, doesn’t indicate a huge amount of confidence.
Right now, it’s tough to quantify how much trouble the Wizarding World is in, though Rowling demolishing her reputation in 2020 has led to a lot of her faithful fanbase disowning the franchise and looking elsewhere for their thrills. In a hint of what might be coming, the developer behind video game Hogwarts Legacy even went as far as assuring us that the author had almost no involvement in it. Alternatively, we could simply see that mainstream audiences don’t care about her transphobia and will turn up regardless.
Either way, I anticipate Warner Bros. to subtly disassociate Rowling from Harry Potter, which may mean the end for Fantastic Beasts as it was very much her baby. In any case, there’s a whole year to go before Fantastic Beasts 3‘s July 15th, 2022 release, so I fully expect more drama to emerge from behind the scenes.