The Fantastic Beasts franchise was supposed to kick-start a new era of Harry Potter, now dubbed the Wizarding World franchise. A prequel to the Harry Potter series and based on one of the textbooks assigned to Hogwarts students, the franchise follows Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), a magic zoologist who specializes in the care of the magical creatures of the wizarding world. What began as a simple spin-off of the Harry Potter franchise quickly morphed into a prequel saga bringing in characters like Dumbledore and Grindelwald.
While the first film was a hit with fans and critics, things quickly fell off the rails with the release of 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. The third movie, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, was a box office bomb, a first for any film in the Wizarding World, effectively ending this segment of the franchise.
While part of the failure of the series can be linked to controversial statements by author J.K. Rowling which continue to damage the Harry Potter brand, another aspect is the matter in which The Fantastic Beasts stories were told. While released as films, the story that was set out would have worked better as a television series, and this is why.
Fantastic Beasts Is Wizard Pokémon
Warner Bros.
When fans first heard the first plot synopsis for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, many noted that the movie sounded very much like a Harry Potter take on the Pokémon franchise, with an individual trying to catch a bunch of strange colorful creatures and secure them in a containment unit that is bigger on the inside it. When the film was released in 2016 Pokémon itself was seeing a resurgence due to the massive popularity of Pokemon Go.
Pokémon, of course, has had movies, but the franchise has primarily thrived on television with the popular anime running for over 25 years and just now concluding its historic run. Fantastic Beasts as a franchise could have borrowed a similar structure, with each episode featuring Newt Scamander needing to track and find a new magical creature while giving audiences time to get to know and understand it, making it feel more like the entries in the fictional textbooks.
The Complicated Potter Lore Wouldn’t Bog Down a TV Show
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a relatively self-contained movie until Act 3, where it is revealed to become a more straightforward prequel to the Harry Potter franchise, tying in the famed dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald. The sequel Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald quickly morphs the franchise from being about the actual beast (and them appearing more as an afterthought) for a political thriller in the Wizarding World. Yet in the context of a two-hour movie, this ends up leaving the films overstuffed and underdeveloped.
A television series would have allowed the franchise to work some of the wider Wizarding World lore into the series without overbearing one storyline. The mystery of Credence’s parentage would have worked better teased over multiple episodes of a long-form story than one two-hour feature film. It also would have allowed the series to dive more into the backstories of some of the characters that are only referenced in passing, like Newt’s history with his brother, or even Dumbledore and Grindelwald’s complicated history which really could have been its own long-form franchise.
Why Fantastic Beasts Was Not a Series
It is easy to say that this is what Warner Bros. should have done, but it is also important to understand the reality of the situation. Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them was greenlit in 2014, and the streaming era of television was still in its early stages. While series like House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, and the revival of Arrested Development showed Netflix could be a major player in television, it was still a new format. Warner Bros. did not have its own streaming service at this point and HBO Max did not launch until 2020, after two Fantastic Beasts movies had been released and the third was filming.
HBO was always an option, as Warner Bros. and HBO were both subsidiaries of Time Warner Entertainment, but at the time the idea of a Harry Potter-related series was not the surefire brand extension it is now. In 2014, the idea of a major film franchise expanding through television was seen as a downgrade, and not worth the cost. It’s worth noting that, while Star Wars had animated series like Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, a live-action series was canceled at the time for being deemed too expensive. Meanwhile, the MCU had only just started trying to expand their franchise with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on ABC, and that was seen by many as a disappointment until the end of season one.
Warner Bros. wanted to keep Harry Potter, at the time a more consistent and reliable brand than even the superheroes of DC, as film exclusives and likely so did author J.K. Rowling. Now, that means Rowling was responsible for the story that was told, and if she wanted to do a more straightforward Potter prequel showing Dumbledore’s history with Grindelwald, she probably should have instead of grafting it onto the plot of Fantastic Beasts; that was her decision, yet one that hurt the series in the long run.
