Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, the Harry Potter spinoff set in 1920s New York, has been interesting, so far, but we haven’t gotten too much of a look at the movie and where it plans to go. The final trailer, though, gets a bit more in-depth with the plot and promises something very different from the Hogwarts kids solving cozy mysteries in a castle.
Mostly we see the fantastic beasts in question, which it turns out are kept by Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) in a bag of holding he totes around with him, because, as firmly established elsewhere in the franchise, wizards are possessed with great powers but little common sense. Unleashing the beasties by mistake aggravates tensions between wizards and humans, not least because an anti-wizard society is running around killing witches and wizards. Which, since the U.S. wizarding community is deeply underground, you’d think the police would care more about, but hopefully they explain that in the movie.
Ribbing aside, the movie, directed by Potter veteran David Yates, looks absolutely superb and the change in tone, following adults using magic and stepping away from the modern era, makes it stand out from its hugely successful forebear. We’ll see just how different it is on Nov. 18.
