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That's the miracle of fiction, there can be more than one.
The sequel to Fantastic Beasts had a fairly steep drop in gross (800 million for the first movie, 600 million for the second). Combined with J.K Rowling doing her best to make sure one of the biggest franchises in the world is completely radioactive, alarm bells must be ringing at Warner.
I doubt that they're dropping this after this movie, but they're probably on a "wait an see" sort of scenario, seeing how this performs and then figuring out a gameplan. In either case it's doubtful they'll drop HP as a film property completely, given how big it is. At most I can see a Solo-esque outcome where this film's hypothetical underperformance gives them enough of a bloody nose to retreat and rebuild. In fact Warner already is spinning wheels
at "how do we make The Mandalorian but with Harry Potter?".
One of the main problems is that as far as I understand, Warner and the Rowling estate have such a entrenched relationship that they have functionlly no way of carrying the franchise without her radioactive brand. And that's quickly becoming a problem, both because of her inability to not go off on hate speech every few weeks and because she is actually a pretty mediocre-to-terrible writer, with every contribution of hers since the actual books being divisive-to-terrible. They're a bit between a rock and a hard place, and I'm sure they're contemplating wayss to ditch Rowling if this goes below expectations.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."
The game was teased with a 2022 release by WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar
in a financial report-related tweet back in January 2022. The game is also getting an art book
this September.
Wow. If they've cut themselves down to 3 movies instead of five while making this one...
Uh, good luck there.
The last film spent so much time setting up SO MANY plot points... like, jfc. Good luck resolving all of them in a single installment.
This series was so botched from the start. We started with a cute little one-off film that was fun and light and had character and personality.
And then the second one was such a rubbish mess of a story built off of a first movie that was never supposed to be the start of a franchise in the first place. Like, I cannot think of a more glaring artifact title in modern films.
I will be genuinely shocked if this film is remotely 'ok'.
I am genuinely expecting it to be the same ruddy mess the last one was and still just as homophobic.
But Dumbledore will say “yass queen” in this one! Representation!
It seems having the author of the books directly write the scripts for these movies resulted in the films inheriting the bloat of the later HP literature. Hence five movies.
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I mean, it’s possible - Return of the Jedi was accordionned together from FOUR planned movies and it’s damn good!
Specifically, Ep. VI would’ve been a Breather Episode focused on taking down Jabba and saving Han, VII about Luke’s Jedi training, VIII about finding his sister (not Leia), and IX about the final showdown with the Emperor.
Believe it or not there actually was a leak a few months ago regarding the plot of this movie and I actually did take a glimpse at it. And for whatever it's worth, if the leak I glimpsed at was legit, this third movie will be an improvement over the 2nd one. Not a complete turn around but enough for most to go "well at least it's better than the last one".
It's a coin toss right now if there will be two more movies after this. It depends on how this third one does at the box office, right now I'm of the opinion that it will do decently, not a huge disaster like some think or wish it will be nor anything too remarkable. It'll get enough to make it's budget back and some extra change.
I do think WB needs to rethink their approach to creating content for The Wizarding World going forward, just like they did with DC and we're seeing how those movies have been improving the past 3 or so years. I hear the new Batman movie is getting good praise and is in for a successful box office run which shows that changing their strategy with a franchise can work.
Edited by clockworkboy on Mar 2nd 2022 at 2:15:04 AM
Tis the great art of life to manage well The restless mind
x3
True, though I'd say it's the exception, not the rule. And, because of Star War's go-with-the-flow storytelling adventure nature, changing plot points on the fly is a lot easier with that franchise. Would it have been great to see Luke get more training? Yes! But we can also accept that he's "trained" as far as the plot needs and move on.
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I would argue that a summary tends to make anything sound good but it comes to the details and execution to pull it off. "Jacob and Queenie reunite and she turns away from the Dark Lord" could be a summary of a scene that's...
- "Hey Queenie, that dude is kinda evil. Don't go with him."
- "Ok."
Technically, it covers that same ground, but obviously not convincing at all.
I've certainly had movies described to me and gone "Huh, why wouldn't anyone like that movie? It sounds fine enough" and then go "Oh... Oh no. I see why..." after starting it.
A lot of reasons...
- Gets away from the "Fantastic Beasts" "Funny wizards with magical creatures" theme of the first one.
- Newt and co feel out of place in a drama that feels like it should be centered on Dumbledore and Grendewald.
- Aurelius Dumbledore just being a MASSIVE Narrative Morton's Fork.
- Queenie, a jewish character, being convinced to the side of the what amounts to Wizard!Hitler is uncomfortable, let alone the actual execution for the character motives.
- The Homophobia that a story that we have *known* for well over a decade is pretty queer just utterly refuses to engage with that queerness at all and instead keeps itself palatable to a straight conservative audience speaks wonders about the creator's allyship...
- Leta's... pretty uncomfortable backstory of "Child by magical rape" and the racial implications of it.
- Nagini's backstory... just so much of Nagini...
- The needlessly over complicated "Baby switch-aroo" and all the plot hanging off of it ends up being pointless and serves nothing but padding.
- Very few of these characters, particularly during the runtime of this movie, have any connection to Gindewald at all. So they kinda just... happen into the climax of the movie by happenstance. And the characters that do have a connection are simply absent.
- It's also just... not a particularly fun movie as I recall? It's so focused on setting things up or needless complications or just simply dower or depressing content that it never really has much fun.
That's all the come to the top of my head. I could be forgetting things.
Yeah crimes of Grindelwald was a pretty terrible movie and the worst of 2018 IMO.
Glad that they cut the series down from 5 to 3, because holy shit, it feels like it went off the rails, and Rowling refusing to portray the tragic love Dumbledore had for Grindelwald in a meaningful way was just cowardly and a waste of good character development.
Honestly, getting some homophobic vibes from her in addition to her transphobia but perhaps that's reaching.
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"Also:
- Nagini pretty much does nothing except follow Credence around.
- A bunch of things that happened at the end of the first film immediately get undone. Credence is alive somehow (and working for a magical circus for some reason) and Jacob just has his memory back.
- Queeny controlling Jacob was super uncomfortable and made me dislike their relationship while I really liked it in the first movie.
- Mc Gonnagol showing up for fanservice despite it contradicting canon.
- Leta dying seems like a waste after the movie gave a lot of attention to her back story.
- The misunderstanding between Newt and Tina seems like an annoying way to artifcially create tension
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Nah. I consider it homophobia at this point.
I'm fucking sick of these shitty media companies going "We're pro-LGBT!" and then... refusing to make ANY movies that are even slightly risky. Which means representation is barrel bottom constantly. And increasingly annoying when it's obvious said representation isn't actually all that risky.
So, no. It's homophobia. I've had people scream at me over calling it that but I don't particularly care at this point. They'll never change unless we make enough fuss over the problem and if drawing the line on that definition to include this behavior gets the job done, so be it.
Tina was a pretty boring character and her subplot about reading fake news about Newt being engaged just made her seem entitled and mean.
Do you remember the story of how and why Just Kidding Rowling revealing Dumbledore to be gay? I genuinely can't remember how it happened.
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Queenie becoming a rapist or at least kidnapping psychopath in 2 was just jarring but even more jarring was that the movie expected us to feel bad for HER.
Edited by RedHunter543 on Mar 2nd 2022 at 2:32:59 PM
"The Black Rage makes us strong, because we must resist its temptations every day of our lives or be forever damned!"I've read that the very first film about gay people that both a) was made by one of the "major" studios and b) had a non-tragic ending for its lead couple was Love, Simon in 2019. Is that true?
A post-series interview asking if Dumbledore ever had a love interest, I'm pretty sure.
Edited by HamburgerTime on Mar 2nd 2022 at 1:33:05 PM
Yeah I agree that their refusal to show Dumbledore as gay has become homophobic. I can kinda get why they didn't confirm it in the main series, but in the Fantastic Beasts series Dumbledore's feelings for Grindelwald are pretty important to the story and being so deliberately vague about Dumbledore being gay becomes pretty weird.
This may be an unpopular opinion/hot take, but I don't really care that much anymore if Dumbledore is gay or not. I just feel like it would be better to create a brand new gay character in that world instead of them beating around the bush about whether this OG character was actually gay the whole time or not.
Maybe it's just because I was never really down for a whole movie series about Dumbledore and Grindewlad because their "supposed" relationship/conflict was just vaguely interesting (to me) at best, but not worth covering over an entire movie series. It could have been better as a maybe a one to three novel series .
And at this point they've done such a lackluster job portraying it that I'm firmly in the "can we please just make these movies about actually finding/catching magical creatures?" camp. Because I'm still waiting for that to be the case since they continue to slap the "Fantastic Beasts" title on these movies.
Edited by clockworkboy on Mar 2nd 2022 at 12:42:58 PM
Tis the great art of life to manage well The restless mind

And the franchise's creator is radioactive now. If they really did cut it down, that probably played a part too. It's not quite dead yet, but many people are basically disowning the series itself now too.