Warner Bros. may have just publicly executed ‘Fantastic Beasts,’ and nobody cares

Watching your favorite movies abroad? Don’t forget to get your Aeroshield smart DNS to access any geo-restricted content.

via Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav dropped a ton of bombshells regarding the company’s upcoming slate of big budget projects, even if a lot of the talk in the aftermath was focused on his shocking failure to grasp even the most basic of arithmetic. One of the biggest takeaways is that Fantastic Beasts may have been dragged round to the back of the barn, but does anyone even care?

Looking at the vastly diminished critical reactions and box office performances of The Crimes of Grindelwald and The Secrets of Dumbledore, we’re inclined to say no. To give you an indication of how sharply and rapidly the Wizarding World prequel series has fallen off a cliff on both fronts, the third installment earned almost $410 million less than the first and dropped by 28 percentage points on Rotten Tomatoes, which is a disastrous feat to accomplish in the span of two films.

Thankfully, the potential public execution of Newt Scamander’s big screen adventures hasn’t sent shockwaves around the internet, because it’s a decision everyone had been expecting the ruthless Zaslav to make from the second he set foot in the WB door.

I’m not sure will be interesting to see how it pans out, in that article it says nothing to do with HP or FB is in active development right now. So looks like fantastic beasts is dead

— theboywizard (@_theboywizard_) November 3, 2022

I think he’s talking about Harry Potter and the stories around those characters. I.e. a Voldemort prequel that has been floating around for a while

It sounds like fantastic beasts is dead and they won’t be going ahead with the remaining 2 movies, judging from this new report

— The Weekly Cut (@weeklycut) November 3, 2022

How do you keep making HP films if Rowling keeps writing terrible scripts while doubling down on trans hate/misinformation? Plus, the diminishing returns for the FANTASTIC BEASTS movies likely means the next two movies are dead.

FB1 – $814M
FB2 – $654.8M
FB3 – $405.1M

— Christopher Marc (@_ChristopherM) November 3, 2022

It was confirmed a while back that Fantastic Beasts 4 didn’t have a script, and hadn’t been given the green light to begin pre-production. Zaslav additionally stated that there are no Wizarding World projects currently in active development at the studio, either, which makes it feel all the more inevitable that the period-set saga’s magical goose is cooked.

Announcing five blockbuster right off the bat was always a questionable decision, but we’ll be very curious to see if an official announcement on the future (or lack thereof) is coming.