The Fantastic Beasts sequels are not following the line of the first movie, repeating the biggest mistake of the DC Extended Universe. The Wizarding World J.K. Rowling introduced readers and viewers to with the Harry Potter saga is quite extensive, and there’s a lot of history in it that goes many, many years back, before Harry Potter was born. In an effort to expand the history of this universe and immerse readers into the wizarding experience, Rowling wrote the guide book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them under the pen name of fictitious author Newt Scamander, as it’s designed to be a copy of Harry Potter’s textbook, mentioned in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
As it happened with the Harry Potter novels, Fantastic Beasts made the jump to the big screen in 2016. Directed by David Yates and with a script by Rowling herself, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them follows Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a wizard and magizoologist, who enlists the help of muggle Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler) to help him round up some escaped magical creatures, while a dark force begins to terrorize New York City. While the movie featured characters mentioned throughout the Harry Potter saga, most importantly Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp), an infamous, dark wizard who was once close to Albus Dumbledore, it focused more on new, likeable characters and a variety of strange, magical creatures. Fantastic Beasts was well received and was a commercial success, making way for a sequel, released in 2018, with more planned for the future.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald continued Scamander’s story but with a focus on Grindelwald’s journey, for which a young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) was introduced. Fantastic Beasts 2 stood out for its big twist at the end, in which Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller) was revealed to be Albus’ long-lost brother Aurelius Dumbledore. This not only made big changes to the ever-changing Harry Potter canon, but it also shifted the Fantastic Beasts saga’s focus to Grindelwald and Dumbledore, instead of it being about Newt Scamander and his own travels, as the first movie was. This change, in an effort to produce more sequels and make it a universe of its own with connections to the Harry Potter saga, is the same mistake the DCEU made right after Man of Steel.
The DCEU began in 2013 with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, which introduced Henry Cavill as Clark Kent/Superman and set the tone for the rest of this universe. The DCEU’s mistake was not giving its characters time to develop and for the audience to know them before teaming them up and going for the bigger stuff this universe has to offer. Right after Man of Steel, the DCEU brought Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the debut of Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne/Batman. This was so the studio could jumpstart the shared universe of DC Comics’ characters, but it was a rushed plan that didn’t work out as intended. Luckily, the team behind the DCEU realized their mistake and are now doing major changes to this universe, and most importantly, they’re going back to standalone movies.
Fantastic Beasts was rushed into a bigger universe and lost its focus, and the saga is now more of a Grindelwald/Dumbledore story than one about Newt Scamander and magical creatures, as was the first one. While it’s not too late for Fantastic Beasts to make a change of plans and go on the right path like the DCEU did, the saga is going through different issues behind-the-scenes, and so its future is now unclear, as it remains to be seen how the audience will react to Fantastic Beasts 3.
