'Fantastic Beasts' to Be Five-Film Franchise

By Maane Khatchatourian, Variety

The ever-expanding Harry Potter franchise just got larger.

The Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them spinoff will be a five-film franchise, J.K. Rowlingconfirmed at a Warner Bros. fan event in London on Thursday.

“I’m pretty sure that there are going to be five movies, now that I’ve been able to properly plot them out,” Rowling said at the fan event from the Empire Theatre in London.

“We always knew that there would be more than one,” she said. Three Fantastic Beasts films were initially anticipated, with the last in the trilogy expected to come out in November 2020.

Rowling wrote the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts, marking her first script.

“So I learned how to write a screenplay while writing a screenplay.” she added. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

The London event also drew stars Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Alison Sudol, and Dan Fogler, director David Yates, and producer David Heyman. Colin Farrell and Jon Voight, meanwhile, attended the fan event in L.A. The global event was streamed via satellite to gatherings in New York, London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, and Rome.

Oscar winner Redmayne stars as Newt Scamander in the films.

Warner Bros. Pictures had announced in August that a second movie in the Fantastic Beasts series was already in the works. Yates is also directing the sequel from a script by Rowling. Yates teased on Thursday that the second movie will be set in another global capital city.

Yates also said the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which hits theater on Nov. 18, will feature a cameo by a young Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grendelwald — characters from the original Harry Potter movies.

The second installment is slated for worldwide release on Nov. 16, 2018.

Watch a stream of the event above.