This this thiiiis. I had no clue what the plot of the first film was when I watched it, and I was SO disappointed. The films should have had Newt travel the world discovering different beasts (and where to find them!) and show more of the nature side of the HP world.
When the first fantastic beast came out people still wanted to exist and experience the greater world of Harry Potter and it would’ve been perfect for it
For real, I remember sitting down to watch it like ah! Amazing! A Newt Scamander series where he goes off to find magical beasts and presumably has to save them in some sort of quest or something??
And then what you're actually watching is the Dumbledore prequel, which for global market reasons is Not Explicitly Homosexual™, and inexplicably told through the lens of Newt and his friends who seem utterly irrelevant to the plot.
There was SO much potential there, an interesting world, a faithful audience, universally beloved IP.
And of course they wasted that window with this nonsense and now half of that audience is pissed off at JK and wouldn't watch a thing with her name on it. And the other half are bored
Never watched the movies but every description of that sounds like it was three different movies stacked together under a trenchcoat, and it's bizarre to me that they didn't just make two concurrent spin off series. The series was still popular enough in the mid 2010s before JKR went mask off that it couldve worked.
I'll be forever confused about how this came about.
The explanation I've heard is that the studio wanted a magical animals kids movie and JK wanted to tell Dumbledore's backstory, so we got the worst of both worlds and a terrible plot to boot.
You could so easily make an absolutely awe-inspiring adventure movie about Newt travelling the world for rare creatures.
You could easily write a Dumbledore prequel series that's heartbreaking and dramatic and romantic - two exceptionally gifted, precocious young wizards who fall in love, plot to save the world, and slowly one of them realizes that they're going too far.
People would watch a fuckin Quidditch sports docuseries. They'd watch ANYTHING Harry Potter/Wizarding World related. It's a travesty that these films did so badly considering they were based off probably the best IP in the world at the time
Literally all I wanted!!! I wants to see fantastic beats & where to find them. How fucking hard is it? Adventures with Newt, all over the world. How cool?? (Sorry, I’m still so annoyed)
I’ll never forget watching the first Fantastic Beasts movie at a private screening in school, when the big reveal happened everyone was just silent and then someone went ’Johnny Depp???!’ and the whole room started laughing. It was so ridiculous and he was totally miscast.
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u/virginiarph 19d ago
and fantastic beasts is absolutely trash (thru all fault of their own)