‘Fantastic Beasts’ Reveals New Clips And Details On How The Whole Series Ends

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (our review available here) is going to be five movies instead of three, with Johnny Depp confirmed to be playing villain Gellert Grindelwald, while a young Albus Dumbledore (who defeated Grindelwald) will be showing up in the second movie.

Now we know director David Yates will return for all four sequels, and we have a better sense of the story arc. Harry Potter author and Fantastic Beasts screenwriter J.K. Rowling told Variety (as transcribed by Coming Soon) that the films will span 19 years.

“Originally, to tell you the truth, we said a trilogy as a placeholder. We wanted to be honest with people that it was going to be more than one movie, but we were feeling our way. Then, there came a point in the drafting of our story where I said to David [Yates], ‘You know, this feels like five movies,’ and I think I’m pretty certain about that. It’s pretty ambitious to tell it in five to be honest because we’re spanning 19 years, but I can see an arc to five — so that’s how it happened.”

The first movie is set in 1926, and the duel between Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald took place in 1945, which is 19 years later, so we can take a wild guess how the quadrilogy ends.

Warner has also released numerous clips for the first installment, which opens this Friday. This first clip (above) shows wizard Colin Farrell questioning Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) to determine if he’s “one of Grindelwald’s fanatics.” The rest show various creatures and spells of this world.

(Via Variety, Coming Soon, Warner Bros. UK, and Fantastic Beasts)