Warner Bros. held a global fan event to promote J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them today and revealed HUGE wizarding world news. The film is no longer a trilogy but five movies.
We just recently learned the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald was at least mentioned in Fantastic Beasts and the new posters showed a connection to the Deathly Hallows but at the fan event today they had more surprises in store!
Dumbledore's name was brought up on the panel which featured actors Eddie Redmayne, Colin Farrell, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler, and Jon Voight as well as producer David Heyman and director David Yates.
“Well we can't tell you too much, obviously, because we'd have to kill you all before you could see the film,” joked Yates. “We do mention Dumbledore in this movie and he kind of features a little bit in a wonderful scene between Colin and Eddie. And Grindelwald does feature in the movie, sort of in the background, and he's going to become a much more prominent part of the stories going forward. Any more than that I really couldn't say. Could you, David?”
Heyman simply shook his head. Yates went on to talk about what might be next for Redmayne's Newt Scamander after the first film. “We next see Newt in another big capital city and it's not going to be New York, it's somewhere else entirely,” he said. “And Jo has actually written the script and it's just as magical and just as marvelous as the first one, but very different which is so exciting for all of us.”
In the latest featurette Warner released, you can see a small big of the Dumberdore exchange as well as Rowling discussing how much she wanted to delve into this time in the wizarding world.
“There are ways in which we connect to the Potter books that I think people will find surprising,” she says in the video. “We're talking about the first time a wizard rose and threatened the world order. This was always where I was interested in going. This is what I wanted to do.
But there was another surprise in store for fans. Rowling herself magically appeared, telling the audience it felt “like old times.” She then went on to say:
I can tell you that…well David has told you that we do talk about Dumbledore and Grindelwald and…he's wincing, I'm not allowed to say too much. I can say one thing, we were doing some script sessions the other day and I can tell you that we always knew it was going to be more than one movie. We knew that from the start and we set a trilogy as a kind of placeholder, didn't we? Because we knew there would be more than one movie but we've now, I think we can say…am I allowed to say that, David? Yeah. So I've now done the plotting properly, so we're pretty sure it's going to be five movies.
“Which they didn't know,” she added, pointing to the actors. HOLY CRAP. Warner must really love what Rowling has been producing with these screenplays to shoot for five films this early.
If you'd like to watch the reveal itself, here's the whole event:
And here's the debut of the main titles from James Newton Howard's score as well. It's quite dynamic!