The past weekend saw the release of the much-anticipated fantasy film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the latest movie to take place in J.K. Rowling’s world of Harry Potter. It’s the first Rowling film to not feature Potter and his friends at all: it begins in 1926 New York City, thousands of miles and many decades away from the 1990s Britain setting of the Potter novels. It’s also the first Rowling film that isn’t based on a novel. Rowling’s book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is a 42-page encyclopedia of fictional creatures in the Potterverse, written to raise money for charity. The film, scripted by Rowling, and intended as the first in a five-movie series, introduces Fantastic Beasts author Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), an awkward researcher and magical beast enthusiast visiting New York, where he runs into non-magical local Jacob Kowalski (Dan Fogler), disgraced Auror Porpentina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), and many, many other members of the New York magical community. It’s a dense, frantic film, full of chases and fights and a weird mating dance, as Newt loses control of his briefcase full of magical creatures, and has to round them back up. The film made a decent start at the box office this weekend with a $75 million domestic take that puts it well below any previous Potter film, but well above any other movie that came out Friday. But how is Fantastic Beasts as a film?
So who is this movie for, exactly?
Kwame: I’m really struggling to figure out who this movie is aimed at. It seems like it wants to use its promise of wild CGI magical creatures to pull in a new generation of young fans who might have missed the entire Harry Potter craze of the 2000s, while also catering to Harry Potter die-hards who really want to learn more about Rowling’s wizarding world. The problem is, the kid stuff, where we spend a lot of time exploring a magical zoo in a briefcase, or chasing after creatures who really dig shiny things, doesn’t knit well with the darker themes working in the background. What did you two think?
Megan: I think you’ve nailed the biggest problem about this movie. Its audience seems to be split into the two camps you’ve described, with very little room in between. So where does that leave someone like me? I fall into no man’s land.
I grew up alongside Harry Potter. He and I were the same age when I read the first book, and so it continued for the rest of the series. By the time the first film came out, I was a few years older. The world it presented felt cheesy to me in a way the novels never did. Although the films got better, they still failed to find harmony between humor and horror. There are so many horrific things happening in the Harry Potter universe at all times. But the films often lacked the nuance that J.K. Rowling had space to weave into her stories over hundreds of pages.