‘Fantastic Beasts 3’ Pushes Production Start To Late Fall

EXCLUSIVE: It has come to our understanding that Warner Bros. is pushing back the production start of the third Fantastic Beasts film.

Originally, the J.K. Rowling-scripted movie was going to go before the cameras in July of this year, and now it’s looking like late autumn.

It boils down to more prep time for part three. The Fantastic Beasts production team literally delivered the last movie, The Crimes of Grindelwald, which made close to $650M at the WW box office, and more pre-production time is needed for the threequel. Literally, Fantastic Beasts 3 would need to be in soft-prep by now to roll cameras in the summer. Actors are being alerted about the push in production in order to change their working schedules. Previous Warner Bros. administrations had the tendency to rush event films to meet release dates, and in this case Fantastic Beasts 3 was rumored to be 2020. Warner Bros. executives now have a new approach of allowing big productions to brew as needed.

There aren’t any hard details about part 3 other than the movie will address a lot of unanswered plot questions, and fans can expect many of their favorite Potter-verse characters after Grindelwald gave us Jude Law as young Albus Dumbledore. No confirmation at this time, but previous Fantastic Beasts movies have shot at Leavesden studios in the U.K. David Yates is still set to direct the threequel with David Heyman, Steve Kloves, Lionel Wigram and Rowling producing.

In the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series, Eddie Redmayne plays Magizoologist Newt Scamander, a collector and tamer of mystical beasts, who makes his way through the secret wizard communities of New York, Paris and London during the late 1920s. The movies have also starred Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, and Dan Fogler. Johnny Depp played the role of baddie Grindelwald in part 2.

Together both Fantastic Beasts movies have grossed a combined $1.46B worldwide. Altogether with the $7.7B made by the Harry Potter franchise, the Rowling Wizarding Universe counts close to $9.2B at the global box office.