HP News: Fantastic Beasts Gets a Release Date
November 18, 2016. That’s the date that Warner Bros. has set to bring the wizarding world back to the big screen with J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Warner Bros had announced last year that it had struck a deal with Rowling to launch a new franchise based on her world of witches and wizards and inspired by Harry Potter’s Hogwarts textbook of the same name. It will follow the adventures of the book’s fictitious author, Newt Scamander. who devotes his career to the pursuit of magical creatures. The studio has not yet announced a director or cast for the film. The book was released to the Muggle world in 2001 as a benefit book.
Rowling is writing the screenplay for the new film, the first in a planned trilogy set in the wizarding world. The story will feature magical creatures and characters, some of which will be familiar to devoted Harry Potter fans. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway. (hmmm… that’s right in the time of a young Dumbledore and maybe Grindelwald…)
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the first to claim the November 18, 2016 date, although Walt Disney Pictures has a placeholder set for an untitled animated feature five days later. (One wonders if Quidditch Through the Ages or Beedle the Bard can be far behind!)
