Warner Bros hasn’t officially canned the Fantastic Beasts series of movies, but it’s also showing no sign of making a new one.
The news earlier in the week that Warner Bros is pursuing the idea of a Harry Potter & The Cursed Child adaptation didn’t particularly bode well for the prequel Wizard World Fantastic Beasts series of movies.
Penned by J K Rowling and directed by David Yates (with Steve Kloves coming in too for script work on the last film), we’ve had three of the planned five movies so far. The latest, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore, arrived earlier this year, and leaned even heavier into Harry Potter lore than the first two. Yet to not much avail. Costing some $200m to make, the movie grossed around $400m in cinemas, and that’s by distance a series low.
Whereas previous movies in the franchise have overlapped a little, in the case of The Secrets Of Dumbledore, work on the fourth one was waiting until the box office returns were in. As such, no screenplay is said to be in place, and the key personnel have been off juggling other projects.
Now, months down the line, it’s believed that there’s still no screenplay, nor any sign of Fantastic Beasts 4 ramping up. Warner Bros isn’t going on record with any response here, but it’s now believed to be a franchise that’s finished its run two films early.
Warner Bros remains keen to work with J K Rowling again, not least because the rights to Harry Potter & The Cursed Child are hers. But with the studio continuing to stall where the Fantastic Beasts films are concerned, it doesn’t seem likely that it’ll be on Fantastic Beasts 4 as things stand.
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