Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opened up a new chapter of the Wizarding World mythology last month, introducing moviegoers to Newt Scamander and showing what kind of shenanigans he was to in New York in 1926. Lest you think this was a one-and-done tale, Warner Bros is already planning on making Fantastic Beasts a five-movie series. The second movie will arrive in 2018, and now we may have our first idea about what the sequel will be about, specially how Newt's former close friend, Leta Lestrange, fits into the plot.
Although IMDB has since corrected a recent change to their Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2 page, The Leaky Cauldron fan site was able to save the information before deletion. Supposedly the sequel will pick up two years after the first movie in Great Britain, and by this point, Newt Scamander has finally become a published author. He's trying to "break emotional ties" with Leta Lestrange once and for all, but that's difficult to do since she keeps showing up at inopportune times to try to talk to him. Eventually Newt decides to hear her out, but rather than try to win him back, she's actually been sent by Albus Dumbledore, who wants Newt's help to permanently defeat the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
Warning: spoilers for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them are ahead!
IMDB is notoriously sketchy when it comes to providing information about upcoming movies, so take this information with a grain of salt. Still, Zoe Kravitz was cast as Leta Lestrange with the intention that she would become a more important character in Fantastic Beasts sequels, so the above information is plausible. In the first movie, Leta was only seen in a photograph, but Queenie learned that she and Newt separated because Leta was "a taker" while Newt was "a giver." Their relationship has been left open-ended enough that a reunion will have to occur in the sequel, but whether Leta will be working for Dumbledore or involved in some other way remains to be seen.
As for why Albus Dumbledore would want Newt Scamander's help battling Gellert Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts 2, it could simply be because Newt was the one who took down the dark wizard in the first movie. However, given that Dumbledore is presumably already quite powerful in the 1920s, the Leaky Cauldron folks speculate that Dumbledore really needs Newt's knowledge about Obscurials, the dark parasitic force that emerges when a young witch or wizard suppresses their magic.
Grindelwald was obsessed with harnessing an Obscurial's power in Fantastic Beasts, so maybe Dumbledore requires Newt's assistance because he's the only wizard who's been able to extract and keep an Obscurial alive without its host being alive. Thanks to The Deathly Hallows, we already know that Dumbledore and Grindelwald won't have their climactic duel until 1945, but in the meantime, Dumbledore will definitely be doing whatever he can to end his former friend's reign of terror, and Newt may hold the key to making progress on that front.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them 2 will cast its spell in theaters on November 16, 2018.
