Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald may not have performed as critically and commercially well as Warner Bros was hoping for last year, but that doesn’t mean the studio is setting this franchise aside. Case in point, while various signs already pointed to Fantastic Beasts 3 moving ahead as planned, WB has officially given the green light to the threequel and provided a few details on what we can expect from this next cinematic Wizarding World adventure.
It’s been announced that Fantastic Beasts 3 is officially in pre-production and cameras will begin rolling in spring 2020. Most of the main characters from the first two Fantastic Beasts movies will be back for the next installment, but one individual who will have a bigger role this time around is Jessica Williams’ Professor Eulalie Hicks, who was introduced in The Crimes of Grindelwald as a teacher at the Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, i.e. the United States’ equivalent of Hogwarts.
One thing that distinguish first two Fantastic Beasts movies from the original Harry Potter film series is its characters traveling to different countries, and Fantastic Beasts 3 will be no exception. Today’s announcement revealed that Rio de Janeiro, Brazil will be one of the locations visited, so we’ll now get to see what Wizarding World life was like in South America’s biggest country during the early 20th century.
Funny enough, Fantastic Beasts 3 visiting Rio de Janeiro was teased a year ago. Around this time last November, when Wizarding World mastermind J.K. Rowling changed her Twitter header image and someone asked what it was, she responded that it was Rio de Janeiro in the 1930s. Now we know this was her subtly cluing her fans in a key Fantastic Beasts 3 plot point.
Behind the scenes, David Yates is back in the director’s chair for Fantastic Beasts 3, and J.K. Rowling, in addition to producing, is co-writing the script Steve Kloves. While this marks Kloves’ first time playing in the Fantastic Beasts corner of the Wizarding World, he’s no stranger to Rowling’s mythology, having written the screenplays for all of the Harry Potter movies except The Order of the Phoenix.
As for when we can expect Fantastic Beasts 3, while the original plan was for it to come out a year from now, production was pushed back to allow for script polishing. So instead, Fantastic Beasts 3 is now slated for November 12, 2021, three years after The Crimes of Grindelwald’s release.
We’re still in the dark about what to specifically expect from Fantastic Beasts 3’s story. When The Crimes of Grindelwald ended, not only had Gellert Grindelwald, this series’ main antagonist, escaped with his followers, which now included Credence Barebone and Queenie Goldstein, but it was revealed that Credence was really Aurelius Dumbledore, Albus Dumbledore’s long-lost brother.
One could reasonably assume that Rio de Janeiro is where Gellert Grindelwald and his followers are hiding out when Fantastic Beasts 3 starts, or at the very least have traveled there for an undetermined purpose. Beyond that, it’s hard to predict what will go down in this flick, though it’s worth remembering that Fantastic Beasts was envisioned as a five-movie saga, which begins in 1926 and ends with Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore’s duel in 1945. So expect Fantastic Beasts 3 to leave some kind of cliffhanger to pave the way for the last two movies.
Stay tuned to CinemaBlend for more updates on how Fantastic Beasts 3 is coming along, but in the meantime, you can plan your trips to the theater in the near future with our 2019 release schedule and 2020 release schedule.
