Spoilers Fantastic Beasts 3 has been officially greenlit, and will be set in Rio de Janeiro

Fantastic Beasts 3, the third movie in the Harry Potter prequel series, has been officially greenlit by Warner Brothers. This one will be set in Rio de Janeiro, and will see the entire cast from the previous movie, The Crimes of Grindelwald return.
Regular Wizard World director David Yates will be directing again, after having previously directed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Half-Blood Prince, Deathly Hollow Parts 1 & 2, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Crimes of Grindelwald. JK Rowling will once again be writing the script, but this time she will be working with Steve Kloves, who wrote all of the Harry Potter movies except Order of the Phoenix, instead of doing it by herself like she did for the first two.
I think I'm one of the few people who enjoyed Crimes of Grindelwald, so I'm looking forward to this one.

 

I don't know......
As popcornflickie as they were, the Fantastic Beast movies really didn't do it for me like the HP movies did. I'll stick to those.

 

I'm wondering if the Brazil setting means they will be doing a Wizard World version of some of the Nazis going to hide out in South America post-World War II.

 

I doubt they're going post-WWII, though. Dumbledore's climatic duel with Grindelwald was in 1945, and that's definitely going to be a part of the fifth and final movie in the series.

 

Oh, never mind then.

 

I really liked the 2nd movie too.

What kind of timeline are we looking at for eventual release?

Ahh, never mind.

https://deadline.com/2019/11/fantastic-beasts-3-jessica-williams-rio-de-janeiro-brazil-1202777066/

^^ Just found the answer.

 

Crimes of Grindelwald might be my second favorite of the whole Wizarding World franchise (Deathly Hallows Part 2 is the top), so I am really looking forward to what's next. Hopefully they didn't get too reactionary after the audience response and change directions. I'm hoping their reaction is mainly just adding Steve Kloves as screenwriter, which I agree with. Screenwriting is not what Rowling does, so having someone so experienced, who she trusts with her story, will only help.

 

I like both films too.

I don't think they're any worse than any of the mainline films - most of which I never thought were as good as some claim them to be. (Hashtag, books are better.)

 

As a graduate of a boarding high school, which was a genuinely magical experience, I say it’s high time to acknowledge that the real magic of the Potter series, such as it was, wasn’t in the generic fantasy nonsense and grade-school Latin but rather in, y’know, the boarding school setting itself. The Houses’ year-long points competition alone is a more engaging story thread than any secret dark magic conspiracy bullcrap, and grown men waving wands at each other while CG clouds fly out of them will always strike me for one as fundamentally silly.

 

I thought the first FB movie was OK, if somewhat flawed, but the second one I found to be a bit of an unfocused, incoherent mess. Indeed, it kinda reminded me of the HP books but with the central plot driving things forward cut out, leaving behind only a myriad tangle of sub-plots that didn't feel like they amounted to anything in particular.

Honestly, thinking on it right now I'm struggling to remember much of anything specific from that movie that wasn't in the trailers. That's impressively forgettable.

I'll give the third one a watch and see if they manage to right the ship, but I'm not holding my breath or anything.

 

I found Crimes of Grindelwald to be a total bore. The first one was just ok.

I'm with you here. I get it. I don't mind a prequel of the early years of Dumbledore, or Dumbeldore in his absolute prime, but he should be the focus, not Newt.

He's too peripheral.

And the fact that they are doing 5 of these movies means that, at 3 years apart, we won't get the conclusion until closer to 2030.

 

I would counter that by saying: if you're going to make a movie about Newt, make it about Newt. If you're going to make it about Dumbledore then make it about Dumbledore. Don't make it about Dumbledore while pretending Newt is the main character, since diminishing your main protagonist in his own story won't help matters.

Personally, I thought Newt was largely the reason the first movie worked as well as it did and I like the idea of telling his story against the backdrop of this larger conflict, but for the narrative to function coherently it needs to be a backdrop, not the actual plot.

Indeed that's a fairly large reason why the HP stories were so compelling: they had an aura of mystery, largely because it's from told from the perspective of children, with whom the adults were reticent to share details.
That's not an option when the story centres on adults so the larger mystery or drama needs to be more personal for the principle characters, and less about the drama between two background characters, or the larger social and political changes that are afoot.

 

On the whole, the Fantastic Beasts films aren't telling Newt's story or the stories of his friends. He and his friends are simply the POV characters through which the audience experiences a story that isn't actually about them.

A good equivalent example would be the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, which features Anakin Skywalker, Padme Amidala, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and others as POV characters, but doesn't actually tell an overarching story that is in any way about them. What we as an audience care about with the Prequels is experiencing the story of the destruction of the Old Republic through those characters' eyes and seeing the way that their personal stories intersect with the larger drama unfolding around them and because of things beyond their control.

The Prequels have been described as Anakin's story, but that is true only in the sense that we see him fall to the Dark Side in order to set up what comes after; if you look at the actual broader narrative implications of what those films do, the story isn't actually about him; it's about Palpatine's rise to power as seen through Anakin's eyes and the eyes of other characters intersected with the personal drama of Anakin falling to the Dark Side.

 

I don't see where it's any sillier than a guy with a magic hammer who can summon lightning, or people running around swinging laser swords at each other.

 

if I were to force you to choose between being hit with a real sledgehammer, hit by a real sword, or have a real small stick waved in your general direction, which would you choose?

Even Mjolnir's lightning strikes are much more grounded in reality than wavy clouds of CG luminescence.

 

I don't think that really fair since in universe the wands are more destructive than a sword or a sledgehammer.
There's plenty of things in movies that look silly in real life, but once the context of the universe is taken into account it works.

 

Not really though, because... why are curses even dodgeable? And given that they are, how are wands even better than guns for combat...

 

Agreed. I liked the first one well-enough, but it felt like they were more concerned with packing as much as they could into the second movie. Too many characters and plotlines and not enough time for them to develop, which in the end made me feel like I didn't care for what happened to them. As for Grindewald, the title confused me when it came to the movie playing out, because as far as the movie is concerned, his major crime seems to be that he exists as he doesn't really do anything particularly noteworthy throughout.

 

Again, my opinion is that said universe is fundamentally silly. Not that silly is inherently bad - the first three Wallace and Gromit shorts and the feature film, for instance, are silly and great - but a silly fictional universe is not a great fit for dark and brooding WW2 allegories, IMO. In a flick about kids on an adventure at a magic boarding school, waving small sticks around works because it reflects the whimsy of childhood, and puts youngsters and adults on a more or less equal footing. When it's a story about just adults... not so much. (When making the Gandalf/Saruman fight in Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson wisely avoided making their staffs shoot out any kind of CG luminescence.)

Given that Yates' Wizarding World movies all looks drab and dreary as heck, moreover, I have no confidence whatsoever that the move to Rio will bring any of the color or vitality that's been missing since Goblet of Fire back to the franchise.

 

I guess I just don't see where it's really any sillier than any of the other SFF franchises, but this is purely about personal taste, so I think we'll just have to agree to disagree here.