Fantastic Beasts Franchise is Allegedly Dead

While the series did kick off with a promising start, WB’s Fantastic Beasts franchise has kind of meandered off toward the end. Though a clash between Dumbledore and Grindelwald is still being teased, it looks like we may not get that moving forward.

According to Puck (via The Playlist) the Fantastic Beasts franchises is ‘effectively dead.’ We don’t have any specifics as to why they decided to pull the plug on Newt Scamander and friends, but it’s said that Secrets of Dumbledore actually lost WB money at the box office.

For now, it’s said that WB Discovery head David Zaslav now wants to shift the focus back to Harry Potter himself and adapt the play Cursed Child with two films. Admittedly, Cursed Child is something that is widely rejected by the fandom despite J.K. Rowling’s initial approval, but WB is said to be waiting on Rowling before they push forward with the project.

While I also think Cursed Child is pretty bad when it comes to the overall Potter story, I think a film could be a chance to rewrite the mistakes of the play. Then again, they can just reboot the whole thing and focus on the adventures of completely new characters. At this point, established franchises like Lord of the Rings have been focused on prequels. I would love to see how the Wizarding World changes moving forward.

For now, all fans can do is wait and see what happens. Potter is a billion-dollar franchise that has pretty solid lore that breeds spinoff potential. It could be a mistake to focus on main players of the original books—a lesson that Star Wars has slowly learned with the hit series Andor.