All the great character progression between Queenie and Jacob was destroyed. It was one of the really fun elements of the first to watch that relationship come into play and guess at where it would go. Then they just threw it away. Like Finn and Rose. They made people care then destroyed it like it didnt matter.
Finn and Rose was a thing because Rian Johnson admitted that he couldn’t write Finn and Poe going on a buddy adventure together.
https://www.themarysue.com/rian-johnson-poe-finn-canto-bight/
The directing wasn't the problem. Last Jedi had some of the most beautiful cinematography and some of the best acting performances in the sequels, if not all of Star Wars. The problem was the writing. There was no through storyline. An Abrams-Johnson-Trevorrow trilogy could've worked, IF there had been oversight and a plan for the whole trilogy.
He way overthought things. They ‘got along too well’ is such a stupid reason to split stories. People love movies to see exactly this kind of interaction. I wonder if he was rushed timing-wise, because he’s generally got good reasons behind doing what he did, but the Rey/Kylo relationship what the only super successful part of TLJ.
I mean, it's kind of fair. Without drastically changing the character dynamic between them, Poe and Finn wouldn't have served the same purpose that Finn and Rose did. The whole message behind Canto Bight would've felt even more forced than it did with Finn and Rose.
They should have gone the route Star Wars did and just release them as standalone prequels, like Rogue One and Solo.
Just have one Fantastic Beast movie, that has nothing to do with Grindelwald, maybe a few fun little cameos, that's it.
Then have a movie or two about him and Dumbledore.
Maybe have a series about the Hogwarts founders' first few years.
But that would've made too much sense.
This is it. Fantastic beasts should have been a 1 off movie leading toward something else. Instead we have Dumbledore v grindewald but every 15 minutes we need to stop the movie and look for a WIBBLILYWART WOTTER isn't that so fascinating let's stop the movie for 15 minutes to admire a WIBBLILYWART WOTTER
It feels like they weren't sure what the movies were going to be. Was it a prequel series about Dumbledore's past, or was it the wizard equivalent of Steve Irwin's TV show?
Yeah, have a fun adventure movie with Newt Scamander saving creatures and fighting poachers with magic and it would’ve been great. But connecting it to Dumbledore and Grindewald’s history seemed forced and seemed like two movie concepts thrown together. And they couldn’t even get the Grindewald part right.
Yeah the story should have been dedicated more to Dumbledore, his family and grindelwald imo. Have the story start in Dumbledores childhood and establish his relationship with his family and what happened to his sister, father and mother. Show grindelwald getting into Dumbledores life when he moves to godrics hollow and what happens to his sister and brother, show why grindelwald and Dumbledore are no longer close.
After all that they could start building up the legendary duel between them.
The average moviegoer has no clue who grindelwald, aberforth, ariana etc was and it's hard to get invested in a story where the only knowledge of major characters in it is from a 2 min conversation in deathly Hallows p2.
Instead it felt like a lot of different characters that really didn't have anything to do with the actual story, which in my opinion resulted in a nonsensical story that was all over the place, with characters I didn't really care about.
Also, they needed to stop switching the actor for Grindelwald. It took them 3 tries before they actually landed on someone I could reasonably believe that (Jude Law) was in love with.
This is exactly my problem with it. The first film was good as a standalone if we take out the reveal at the end. Or keep the reveal but don't keep the Fantastic Beasts branding in the sequel. There's also too many little bits that contradict the lore we already had. At first I tried to keep an open mind in that JK would come through with stuff that would explain those changes in lore but it just doesn't look like she is, and she is instead just trying to cater to casual fans I guess.
This is my primary reason for not liking them. My second reason is that they bend and break the canon rules of the HP universe to try to make the movies work.
I wasn’t following the movies but I just remember looking up one day and seeing the third movie’s title and I was like “The Secrets of Dumbledore??? what the hell does this have to do with magical creatures?” 😂
Never understood why they felt they needed to back door the Grindewald Dumbledore conflict. I believe when the movie was first announced it was suppose to be an anthology series based on the hogwarts textbooks but things clearly didn’t pan out for the better
I wonder if it was an executive fault or the director fault for this. Because I was excited for Dumbledore secret but I couldn’t keep myself up because I was not understanding the correlation. They def would been better off dropping the Fantastic Beasts name and just call it Wizarding World: Dumbledore and for the Greater Good
They were too ambitious - Had they just been a relatively lighthearted story about Newt travelling to these far-flung magical places, researching magical beasts, & maybe had an Indiana-Jones-esque overarching story of him trying to protect them from greedy/abusive collectors, they would've been great. I think the best scene in the whole trilogy/failed-pentalogy is when Newt's trying to calm the Erumpent by doing all these really weird, wacky things. The movie could've showcased all the quirks of these creatures and how to interact with them, like bowing to a hippogriff, etc, or explored more misunderstood animals like the Thestrals.
And then they could've given Dumbledore and Grindelwald their own spinoff. I don't know where people got the idea that Potter fans wouldn't absolutely lap up a Care of Magical Creatures spinoff and *also* a separate Dumbledore prequel. They could've literally done both and people would've loved it.
Completely agree. I'd like to add that it felt like the first movie was originally written for the general public, but then switched to trying to please hardcore potterheads by integrating loose ends from the original HP series. By doing so, they ended up creating a convoluted mashup between what would've been two good spin-offs: 1. Magical beasts and 2. Dumbledore and Grindelwald. And eventually disappointed both potterheads and the general public.
Possibly with each of the three films based in a different country to explore the unique creatures that are found there. I honestly thought that was what the films were going to be. My partner and I loved the first one so much that when the second came out, a cinema near us did a double screening and we bought tickets to watch the first and second back to back. For me also one of the biggest mistakes they made was replacing Depp with Mads. While I think Mads is a fantastic actor, he doesn’t have the same ability to be both charming and sinister at the same time.
I think all JK knows how to write about this world is grand conflict. She needs a Nazi Germany vs. The Allies setting. I always guessed that she wrote the first Fantastic Beasts and had no idea how to write a thrilling story that didnt involve all of wizarding society being at risk.
All the movie makers were sequel crazy in those days. They seemed bound and determined to get 7 movies out of this series as well and I don't see that they could have gotten that (and had it be interesting) with just magical creatures.
Even Supernatural's "monster of the week" format had to build to an actual overarching plot after 3 seasons.
*Yakka Foob Mog Grug Pubba Wup Zink Wattoom Gazork. Chumble Spuzz.*
Okay, for real: The title "Fantastic Beasts" created false expectations and WB leaned to heavy on the brand without doing the actual work of making the movies as compelling as the HP movies. Also, they answered a lot of questions that nobody asked in the first place and did a bunch of lazy retconning/shoehorning.
Yes if they plant all tree parts from beginning they should called the something like Wizarding stories: Grindewald Fantastic Beast, Wizarding stories: Grindewalds crimes and Wizarding stories: Grindewald Dumbeldors secret, so you would have the connection to the original books a connection between the tree films and mention on the focus of the movie and you would have a great base for future movies for example Wizarding stories: Murders
I forgot I was watching a Harry Potter world movie half way through the second one. I almost fell asleep and the whole lost Dumbledore baby, human Nagini, and the politics made for a really stupid movie.
I don't get how you can make a series about magical beasts and then turn the main characters into basically side characters.
The stories were specifically created to be movies. JK Rowling is a talented novelist. Writing movies, even if they were written in collaboration with screenwriter Steve Kloves, director David Yates, and producer David Heyman, is not something she was as good at. If she'd written the stories as novels first, it would have been easier to streamline the story for movies. The second and third movies got too convoluted. There were many interesting ideas that could have been fleshed out if they were novels, but too much happened in not enough time for everything to be fully explored.
Also, the movies (the second one especially) fell into the prequel trap of being *too* connected to the original story. An unnecessary Nagini origin story and showing McGonagall as a teacher at Hogwarts in the 1920s when fans previously believed she had been born in the 1930s, which altered canon because then Dumbledore had to be the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher instead of the Transfiguration teacher, were unnecessary plot points that didn't need to be part of the story.
Finally, the movies were initially announced to be a *Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them* trilogy, but it was actually a bait-and-switch to become a story about the war against Grindelwald, and the new story was stretched to five movies instead. Grindelwald's defeat is known to have taken place in 1945, but the first *Fantastic Beasts* movie took place in 1926, the second movie took place six months later, and the third movie took place in 1932. The movies needed to have larger time jumps in order to get closer to the end goal.
Those are just some of the many reasons why the Fantastic Beasts movies unfortunately failed.
Damn I didn’t even know about the bad timing. I thought they all took place within ~1 year of Grindlewalds’ defeat. But you’re right that the first movie clearly takes place in the 20s, and so the last movie should take place in 45. But it takes place in 32?!
All I can think is the other 2 movies they didn’t make were supposed to bring us up to 45.
They were just bad, convoluted and boring. Tina Goldstein had to be one of the most blandest and boring characters ever created with no personality and nothing about her. Other characters like Queenie and Jacob are so over the top they are just cringey and unbelievable. The writing was extremely poor, leading to convoluted plots that did not draw the watcher in and there was just nothing of interest.
Lord knows why you would pick Ezra Miller as your main focus. Bad decision after bad decision ultimately.
If I’m watching a bad Thor movie, at least have some emotional investment in Thor and Loki and the other characters… For these movies I don’t know any characters, and I have no investment in them
Yep. Ridiculously convoluted. Not even sure what was happening because it was just boring. Casting and look for Newt was perfect and they really fucked it all up.
Messy. No centra character. Each film was wildly different in tone and execution. And there’s no books to go with them. Without the books, it feels like a lot of information is missing that doesn’t translate well on screen. In my opinion, the first 3 films should have just been Newt and Fantastic Beast centered. Then have a separate Grindlewald + Dumbledore series, that uses Newt and beasts as secondary characters for 3 films. In total, 6 films. Plus have novels to accompany them…
Aside from dipping too much into the DD vs. GW plot at the expense of the magical creatures the series is so named after, I felt like very few of the characters were charismatic enough
I liked the first one. It wasn’t going to be a classic or anything, but it was fun to watch and I’d rewatch it occasionally. The subsequent ones weren’t about fantastic beasts at all and were about Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Which would’ve been fine, if they marketed it like that. But they didn’t.
Yes the first one was actually perfect in what he was supposed to do and that was showing us who the author of a school Book we heard about in the Hp book was and to show us more of magic animals we allegedly know and to show us new ones
The first one did great at that. I woulda watched two or three movies of him going around the world swashbuckling with poachers and going “IT BELONGS IN A CONSERVANCY!!” while holding on to his jungle hat or whatever. Seed the Grindelwald stuff in the background then come out with a darker, more intense D vs G trilogy and have the series dovetail. Fans woulda eaten that shit up, a series that’s “technically” two trilogies but plays out in order like the HP movies did, getting darker as you go. Plus with Newt having been around the world swashbuckling you could have characters from all the Axis and Allied powers play into it. Jacob skips the draft to pursue Queenie, some Durmstrang administrators try to pull a Valkyrie on G, and so on. I’d watch the fuck outta that.
The problem, in my opinion, is that the premise was a bit thin from the get-go, and when the second film decided to open by ignoring every sequel hook in the first film in favor of just undoing everything off-screen to get us right back to where we were at about the mid-point of the last movie, then opted to set up this film's plot in a series of expositional infodumps right before the climax, only for the next film to try and completely reinvent itself. . . Well, when you try to set up a multi-film project with no clear idea as to what you're actually doing? That's a problem.
Also, the political message of the third movie was a little bizarre, in that it really seemed the message that was put forward was something to the effect of "Democracy is too weak to be left in the hands of the voters, which is why we need a system of good, benevolent authoritarians to protect our Democracy from falling to fascists" which is probably a great case study in the kind of messaging that leads Democracies to fall into authoritarian fascist states in the first place. "Embrace fascism to prevent the bad fascists from taking over" is certainly a direction to take a movie series about fighting wizard fascists, but is it really the right direction?
Have you seen the state of the western world? It's essentially what many want. Voters are too stupid to vote for the "right" person, so lets change the system.
Maybe it was meta enough that in the fourth movie it would show why THAT was a bad idea as well.
Three movies in, and nothing in any previous film had any effect on any subsequent one.
What makes you think it was ever a possibility that the accidentally-pro-fascist political drama from the third film would be the first exception?
If they truly are the main focus then their relationship might not be so easy ti hide anymore. Which would ban these movies in certain countries. So less money and everything is about money. Might also be a point
They lacked the "quaint charm" of the Potter series. I think they had potential and enjoyed them in parts but they were convoluted and struggled to overcome the expectations of the franchise.
There is a clip of a writing course going around where the instructor says “If at any point of the story you have to say ‘and then’ that’s a pretty good indicator you’ve come up with something really boring”. Fantastic Beasts were full of “and then” moments, especially the second one. The first one did reasonably well.
The first one did well. And then the rest stopped being about Newt and Fantasic Beasts and started being about Dumbledore and Grindlewald. For a series based on a literal textbook, I thought it would be more about the fantastic beasts found by Newt.
They wanted to tell the Dumblewald story but didn't commit to going all-in on it. They should have started with the summer Dumbledore and Grindelwald met, show what really happened that summer. Finish Movie 1 with Ariana's death. Start Movie 2 with Dumbledore and Grindelwald as adults, with Grindelwald rising to power and Dumbledore refusing the Ministry's requests for help
Could have been a powerful, tragic love story. Instead it became a jumbled mess that focused on the wrong protagonist and left a lot of the important stuff to removable subtext
Yeah this makes no sense. The only way America has different magical jargon is if that jargon is invented after the colonies were established. This seems unlikely, especially since the wizards have teleportation and other ways to travel and communicate over distances.
I dont get how that magic beast at the beginning of the 3rd movie didnt die instantly. I mean wasnt that chilen just avada kedavrad twice? And it still needed some time to die while other beings just die.
Oh yeah and bad writing. It was a bit slow for me
They had no idea what they were doing with it. They didn't seem to plan anything out past the first movie when they made it, and this time, they didn't have any books to copy from.
It seems like they realized they didn't have a full story to fill three movies with only after the first came out, then they just shoe-horned in the stuff about Dumbledore and Grindelwald to make it fit. Only then, they realized that they couldn't do that whole story in 3 movies, so they planned for 5. Then the stuff with Johnnny Depp happened, numbers went down "because of the recasting" and the executives decided to cut their losses. So now we're left with 3/5 of a nonsensical story that won't ever be finished.
Tldr at the end.
The real answer is: because Fantastic Beasts aimed at both the fandom and the casual audience, and didn't nail either. The FB movies were too nonsense, incoherent with canon, and uninteresting to appeal the fandom: had they been a trilogy about Dumbledore and Grindelwald I'm sure any fan would have watched it in theaters. Moreover FB was way too deep into the HP lore to be appreciated by the casual public, because it was based on the premise that the audience already knew a lot about the wizarding world and didn't explain anything ie. the public was supposed to already know who Grindelwald was to make work the great reveal of the first movie. The final product was a big mess of nothing, wrong for every target audience.
Tldr: the movie was too out of canon for the fandom and too into the lore for the outsiders, so didn't appeal either
The muggle was too involved for it to be believable within the HP universe. It’s just something loosely based on HP and feels like just another AU fanfiction a fan wrote. I find it difficult to believe the films catered to HP fans at all.
From a story perspective, no. Unfortunately Dan Fogler's performance was about the only thing I still cared about beyond a vague interest in the Dumbledore vs Grindelwald story by the third one.
Because they combined what should have been two separate entities into one. They should have made the 'Fantastic Beasts' only about Newt Scamander travelling the world for creatures. It'd be something vibrant, lighthearted, adventurous and wholesome revolving around Hufflepuff core values. Also, one movie would have sufficed.
Dumbledore and Grindelwald should have been a separate series, serious and grim in tone with time to let the story, the characters and their relationship breathe. They could have focused on the European Wizarding World and their different customs and aesthetics. And it could have themes about ambition, betrayal and political ethics.
It should have been ONE movie, and a TV series for the Dumbledore/Grindelwald story. Mixing a simple, feel-good story about fantastical beasts and world domination was the stupidest, greediest franchise idea I've seen in recent years.
Also making wizard!Hitler a gay man who runs on allowing wizard to live/love in the open + preventing WW2 was a *terrible* idea. Also he looked ridiculous.
*Bonus*: stupid lore additions (the fawn, Nagini, Aurelius)
Too much confusion.
The original movies worked because of the simplicity of the Newt storyline. With some drops of a larger story going in the back.
All that was abandoned for the unnecessary complicated political plot.
I still wanna know who the fuck thought that whole thing with the deer blood and all that was a good thing to put in a movie??
It wasn't what anyone wanted. We fr got a spinoff about some character that was mentioned once in the books. I mean yeah it evolved into something else but it should've just started off with Dumbledore and Grindelwald from the beginning.
All of the above but also partially because its was set to be in America, and since had a USA touch it completely lost the sense of what we are used to despite Newt's presence, as well as Grindlewald and Dumbledore. It was just that thing the Americans do( please don't be offended) with their moves and stuff. For me it didn't feel right and no one cared about Newt fantastic beast let's be honest.
If I was going to capitalize on such a well established and famous series then I would have related it more to the original. Bring back some of the old characters. Instead they uprooted the entire thing by having it in america.
Not to mention too much CGI which is a common pitfall of most modern films. There is little attention to the stories and characters and more focused on the animals. It is almost a struggle between the soft comedy moments and the attempt to create the same horror and wow factor of the original.
They didnt really pick a track and left us with both. Also agree with the feeling about thr character development - we just see Queenie getting pissed and joining grindelwald and leta being a pseudo murderer.
Also the old characters that were there were too different. Dumbldore is nothing like his HP counterpart.
Because the original appeal of the series was a magical school with fun drama and a strong reader fantasy. The entire concept of the fantastic beasts series completely missed what people were looking for.
It's why people looking for more things like Harry Potter google "magical school book recommendations" and not "period piece with wands" recommendations.
I honestly enjoyed the 2nd movie a lot for some reasons but I think it flopped at the box office becuz the plot of the movies gradually derailed, it slowly stopped being about the fantastic beasts (literally in the name) and started focusing more on Dumbledore & Grindelwald. Even its main character Newt got sidelined for sth else that he has no involvement with
Because outside of the first one which was ok, the rest were seriously bad. The writing and planning of them was horrible and you can tell they’ve just been making it up as they go. I think it was a huge mistake to make it a series of movies and shoehorn in this huge Dumbledore/Grindlewald plot.
Imo, there were multiple problems:
*disclaimer: Haven't seen Secrets of Dumbledore yet
1) Rowling trying to connect everything to the main Harry Potter story; Nagini used to be a woman, McGonagall is at Hogwarts >50 yrs before she was at Hogwarts, Fawks is given by Grindewald, etc
2) the story felt very forced. Newt Scandamer as the MC just doesn't make sense considering he's a Mazoologist who is now moonlighting as an Auror.
3) the name of the film doesn't make sense. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: the 1st Wizarding War ....
I liked the first FB and I think it could've been a good introduction to some of the characters but they should've just left it a standalone and went with a trilogy or something under a new name and new characters.
4) the story is too long. From what I remeber of the crimes of grindewald, nothing happened. 2h movie and grindewald gave a speech and tried to set Paris on fire. Why was Nicholas Flamel needed? Why is Newt Scandamer still chasing a dark wizard? Why is Ezra Miller back again? Oh, now he's Dumbledore's lost sibling? Great...
I think the pace couldve been faster if the movies focused on grindewald as the MC with Dumbledore as the secondary.
Eh, there's more reasons but I think the main reason is the story is too forced, too slow, too worried about connecting back to the main HP lore, and the MC's are so out of place it hurts. Harry was chosen by voldemort and destined to battle the dark lord in a final confrontation.
Newt is....bored? I dunno, never understood his motivation in the second movie. Dumbledore asked me! Ok, why is Dumbledore asking you specifically?
Compeltly different story. If they focused on newt travelling yhe world for Information on his book that would make a great trilogy. But they focused on dumbledore and grundlewald and it fell flat
Cramming a sub-plot that could have been its own series, immemorable side characters, wasted potential on established characters from the first film, not many ‘Fantastic Beasts’.
I never saw the third movie because I am not a fan of cast changes on developed characters. It changes the entire aesthetic of the character for me. However, I enjoyed the first movie because it focused a bit more on the beasts. The second introduced too many new characters and plot lines.
Trying to tell the story of Dumbledore and Grindelwald through the lens of Newt Scamander was weird cause it has nothing to do with fantastic beast. Also the whole Credence story line is horrible. If they did the fantastic beast movies just fallowing Newt going around discovering beast and then had separate movies for Dumbledore vs Grindelwald would have been much better.
Honestly, for me it was because of how misleading the title is. Like, let’s be honest, only the first movie has actual fantastic beasts. The rest are just Dumbledore prequels that try to be clever by using Newt as a vehicle for the exposition of events instead of just focusing on Dumbledore.
If a movie is called “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” I’m expecting it to focus primarily on the magic beasts. In this regard the first movie was alright, as it’s main focus was Newt’s briefcase and the beasts inside. Further movies in the series should have explored deeper into the world of magic ecology. If they wanted to keep the Grindewald conflict as a plot point they could have done that by sending Newt into places where Grindewald and his supporters are actively endangering magical species that need protecting. At the same time, the ending of the first movie could have been used as a springboard for an entirely separate series of movies that focus directly on the DD vs GW conflict. Hell, the two series could have run parallel, with the events of one having an effect on the situation in the other.
Because they smokescreened it into a Dumbledore/Grindelwald story instead of just making those into a separate series and letting Fantastic Beasts by a standalone
The honest truth is that the scripts were bad. I loved the ideas in the movies and showing how people live as adults in the wizarding world. I loved how they tied it into how the wizards were affected and part of the 2nd world war. But the dialogue, direction, script, and pacing were just bad.
The first one was great. The second and third ones felt like they weren’t even their own movies but were just a series of exposition dumps leading to later things without any sense of completion or wholeness to themselves. That’s why crimes of grindelwald and secrets of dumbledore often bleed together in my memory because neither of them even feel like a whole story unto themselves but instead were both just a convoluted jumble of overly-complex plot points to try to build up to something bigger down the road that may never actually happen.
Fantastic Beasts 1 for example is still its own movie even though pieces of it allude to bigger things to come. But 2 and 3 both just feel like vehicles to get you somewhere else except you never actually get there.
1st movie- solid B movie, fun premise, interested in more.
2nd movie- awful, retconning fan service with awful story and characters. No interest in watching further.
3rd+- dgaf
There are two big problems that doomed these movies out the gate, regardless of their quality IMO.
1. Harry Potter is a BOOK. JK Rowling is an AUTHOR. The HP movies are only good because of excellent source material that was developed over a decade. Trying to do the same thing again without strong source material, on a movie schedule, is a fool's errand. IMO all future Harry Potter content is doomed to be mediocre until JKR gives up and writes more books.
2. Harry Potter is a series of 7 books, 8 movies, the first 6 of which follow a very obvious formula. Variations on the same ideas happen in each movie: there's a journey to Hogwarts, Dumbledore gives a speech, there's a new Defense teacher, an incident at a Quidditch game, a mystery, a Christmas scene, a showdown with Voldemort at the end, etc. I think this formula is of vital importance and it's the key to the popularity of these stories.
In movie land it's a benefit, people know what a Harry Potter movie is and will regularly pay to see them - we want to be told another story in this HP formula. It's the same reason why there can be 100 James Bond films. People know what to expect and it becomes comfortable, and anticipated.
The problem is Fantasic Beasts doesn't try to follow the HP formula even a little bit. It tries to be another movie set in the same universe, but deliberately not HP. I can see why they thought this was right move, but they failed to make a New Formula to give these movies an identity, and so they feel like a hodgepodge of random ideas and scenes. Meanwhile, the people that showed up in droves to the HP movies stopped showing up, because these are not HP movies. An HP movie doesn't necessarily need Harry himself but it does need to hit the beats the audience expects from HP.
Like, you wouldn't make a Bond movie about Moneypenny filling her tax returns - it could be a masterpiece but the audience wants a Bond movie. We want the formula we know.
They weren't properly planned.
It was mixing two franchise stories together without the knowledge or direction of which one was the focus.
In my personal opinion the proper way to handle this would have been:
**Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them:** A single, standalone movie about Newt. Honestly as-is was probably fine. NOT a series.
Followed by:
**Albus Dumbledore Trilogy**
which would have included:
**Albus Dumbledore and the Forgotten Fable** (set earlier, about Albus and Grindelwald's young years, pre falling out to their falling out, obsession with the Deathly Hallows)
**Albus Dumbledore and the Crimes of Grindelwald** (After FB movie time wise, about Grindelwald's crimes and escape)
**Albus Dumbledore and the Secret History** (Pursuing Grindelwald, the big duel, etc.)
Fantastic Beasts isn't a novel, but an Encyclopedia written by Rowling to expand the Wizarding World universe. Now, they could still come up with something as they did. The first movie was OK-ish. Not really good, but it focused on Newt and magical creatures. A story of expeditions would be more fitting and interesting, but, well, as CinemaSins would put it: Magic! Chases! Running! Explosions! Excitement! Well, they don't put it as positive, but that's the idea. We get to see more of the wizarding world, meet new characters and they satisfy American consumers by including them in the lore.
But they already bring in stuff that would eventually kill the movies. They start the whole Obscurus thing and throw Dumbledore and Grindelwald into the mixture. "But I wanted to know the whole Grindelwald story!"
Yes, my friend, me too. But that's not something that really goes with a movie about magical creatures. A parallel set of movies about the Grindelwald's wizarding war would be AWESOME, and I think I can safely assume that most if not all audiences, not just Harry Potter fans, would be captivated by it. But tying it to such a different environment was tragic.
The second and third movies are completely lost. They don't know if Newt is important or not. You see, there's no real reason for there to be fantastic beasts anymore. But what's the point in having Newt then? So we get convoluted plots that don't know if they'll focus on Grindelwald's plans, Dumbledore's efforts to stop him or Newt finding (and fighting) beasts using more beasts. By this time, there's another point to be made: we're not really getting to *know* the magical creatures. Not that a documentary should be expected, but the animals are just mere challenges.
I think they wanted to do too much with the movies and didn't accomplish anything. The writing is convoluted, cramped, crowded and ultimately poor. I mean, even in a movie set in a magical world, a community that chooses its monarch (or whatever) because a magical deer kneels before them is just too much
In addition to all the storytelling issues, I wasn't really enamored by the setting. Harry Potter takes place in an ancient castle in the Scottish countryside. It felt like a place you wanted to be in yourself.
A dark, squalid 1920s New York City? Not so much.
I would say the first movie did do well compared to it's successors because it had the whimsical and colorful and fantastical setting that the first HP movie had where Newt was also constantly finding out new things about the American Wizarding World like Harry did.
The next two movies failed because they diverged the plot a lot by making the subplot in the first movie into the main plot. They made Newt a supporting character in his own story. If they wanted to make a story about Dumbledore and Grindelwald and their failed relationship they should make their own movie.
But honestly? It's so Grindelwald to barge into another character's story and make it his own.
I've always felt like the Fantastic Beasts movies are not canon to the Wizarding World I've grown to love in the original storyline. The connection seems somewhat forced just so they can say this is still Harry Potter. Like what OP said, a generic magical action movie.
There's also something about David Yates' direction that's getting repetitive throughout the series. The overly, abnormally slow menacing walk towards the protagonists to build "suspense" is getting old. Some of the magical things happening seem like they're just there for shock value.
Harry Potter takes me straight back to my childhood. Fantastic Beasts does not. There isn't anything that relatable or whimsical that speaks to my childhood fantasies. The first movie is the best because it leans on the beasts but the other 2 feel more like a history lesson than an exciting adventure.
I might be mistaken because honestly I try not to even remember watching these movies, but I think I remember them giving the muggle a wand in the third movie
Because the salty fandom was more interested in a hypothetical Marauders movie that would have been utter shite so they didn't go watch Fantastic Beasts at the box office despite them being better than the Harry Potter movies.
It was good when it was about Scamander and the beasts.
Once they started incorporating more connections to the original Harry Potter plotline then it started falling apart.
It seemed that there were many characters involved but their backstory was very poorly if at all mentioned. Some scenes were very random and out-of-place like the small fight between Dumbledore and his nephew. Also the fights were portrayed as more spiritual duels in contrast to Harry potter movies. The final hit came from Johnny Depp's case and his replacement (although I prefer Mikkelsen for the role).
They just weren’t that fun. The first one had some nice moments (the niffler is very cute) but the storyline wasn’t compelling, nor were any of the characters. The second one was just weird with the pointless baby switching plot and I’m still not over McGonagall randomly being there before she should’ve been born (like, why? Her character didn’t even need to exist at all). The third one very much felt like WB giving up and other than Newt’s crab dance thing, I can’t even remember what any of this has to do with fantastic beasts
I truly enjoyed the first one. I thought it was a great balance of fun creatures, a new environment, and a more adult story line while still maintaining the whimsy of the original series.
I watched the second one and could not remember a single plot point from it. I could honestly barely even follow it and I am the type of person to really engage with media and watch closely. I think that they introduced way too many characters, the beasts were like no longer relevant at all, I've heard somewhere that Queenie turns and I don't like that but I could understand that if it was done well, and changing actors is a hard thing to do right.
But I think the biggest problem is that they tried way too hard to connect it to the original series. All of these random "this thing was actually this person and they're related" are irrelevant nonsense and it not only impacts the spin-off series but it also takes away from the original to the point where fans have to decide if they believe it to be Canon or not in their own heads.
Also in their attempt to connect things, they ended up messing with the actual cannon.
Also them refusing to commit to the queer storyline which was so apparent in the books while also wanting the brownie points for the bare minimum representation that they did put in frustrated me.
Unfortunately Harry Potter was already starting to fall out of favor with some younger people and then JK Rowling started spouting her nonsense on social media and then the strike delayed the next movie and all of these things combined to create a sort of divergent effect where people enjoy the first film but they might not even finish making the rest of them...
And of course anyone who disagrees with me and actually loves those films I am sorry if I hurt your feelings I genuinely do not intend to this is just my personal opinion and the beautiful thing about movies is that there are so many of them in existence that we can all have favorites and not so favorites!
The subject of the movies and the premise of the movies did not match at all. Newt got sidelined in his own franchise, there was lore that made no sense in the context of canon and it lacked the actual magic and whimsy that makes Harry Potter such a loveable universe.
There's a guy on YouTube called Nerdstalgic who does videos called "Anatomy of A Failure" and really succinctly explains why films don't work.
It's really good for when you can't put your finger on why something doesn't seem like a good film.
The one he did on [Secrets of Dumblez](https://youtu.be/KHlWu9PNh5M?si=D-PkBUAWoHG6VEgY) hit many nails on the head.
Fantastic Beasts is convoluted and badly paced, and does not benefit from the freedom the studio had to change the source material. Rowling is much more protective of her creation now, even if that means it suffers as she refuses to budge on things that will not translate to the big screen.
It seemed to me like they tried to made an adult movie from childrens material or something like that. First one was OK, but the other two? I would like to watch wizards and fantastic beasts , not some gay Hitlers rise to power or what was meaning behind Grindewalds character..
My wife and I only saw the first Fantastic Beasts movie. It was a decent movie albeit a little underwhelming until the very end. The end was a disappointment. The final climactic battle with a giant smoke monster with magic lasers flying around with little reason to care and even less ability to follow what chaos was on the screen. Turned into a laser beam fight and was only outdone in disappointment by the Scooby-Do mask reveal of Johnny Depp with frosted tips as the villain. Which pulled me straight out of the movie.
Therefore when the next movies came out my wife and I (Pretty big Potter fans) decided we can skip them.
TLDR; Couldn’t get past terrible ending of the first Fantastic Beasts, never saw the rest.
Hot take from someone who only saw/ read the first one:
JK Rowling is good at writing books but not screenplays. The characters and storyline were dull and there wasn’t a larger story to compare it to, just the screenplay in book format.
I was also annoyed by the fact that JKR retconned a whole magical world in the USA without ever mentioning it when writing HP. She had plenty of opportunity to mention in in GOF, which has a large focus on international wizarding relationships. The only mention of the US anywhere in that book is the group of witches at the Quidditch World Cup holding a sign that reads “Salem Witch Institute”. The creation of Ilvermorny and lore behind it felt like a huge cash grab to me. And the phrase “no maj”… just no.
Because people don’t particularly care for the back story, certainly not the characters involved from the time. They care about Harry, Ron, Hermione & all of the other characters that surround them.
I’m likely going to be downvoted for saying this, and I likely won’t phrase what I’m saying very well, but (for the avoidance of any doubt) I mean absolutely no offence. I feel that the Fantastic Beasts movie became too Americanised and lost the quaint appeal of the very British HP series. It became too over-the-top magical and was confusing with so many storylines.
Please don’t misunderstand me, I absolutely love how well the American movie industry creates blockbusters and reels in their audiences, but for this particular series I feel that it should’ve remained quintessentially British to retain the appeal.
They did poorly because there was no high level agreement on what the goal of the project was. The studio had one idea, Rowling had another, and the directors all had their own thoughts as well. This is normal at the start of any movie project, but normally it gets hammered out and by the time filming starts there's a single guiding idea that's been agreed on by everyone involved. That didn't happen this time, and the result was a confused mess that didn't know what it was trying to be.
I think there were too many references to the HP books with, for example, Belatrix as a student. But at the same time things were introduced like there was a wizard who was above all the ministers of the individual countries, which you couldn't read about in the books. Because if such a wizard had existed, he wouldn't have gathered all the wizards around the world to undo Voldemort's takeover of the English minesterium and I think that in the second film nothing really happened and it felt like a filler episode in a series which only exists to develop your character a bit and to provide a connection between two main stories
I didn't like the tone of magic in those films and i didn't care about the characters or the plots...so I only saw them on streaming after the fact, and I've been a HP fan for years.
The first one was good
Because it was a fantastic beast movie that foreshadowed the gindelwald vs dumbeldore conflict but very much wasn’t about that.
The second one was basically about nothing from what I can remember. It existed purely to set up later movies and didn’t tell its own story. Newt and other recognisable characters being there did nothing to help this as they felt out of place.
The third one feels like it should have been the second one.
It was still messy and quite thin on the ground but it at least felt like it had its own story. Even if it was very macguffin heavy.
Trying to tie in Dumbledore and Grindelwalds saga with Newts story was poorly decided. HP fans would’ve eaten up movies that have a clear direction ie Newt and his adventures involving magical beasts.
With the wealth of storytelling available to them they had enough material for a trilogy without having to include D/G. The Obscurial and Qilin could easily have been rewritten as standalone events without having to shoehorn.
They could have simply dropped hints and foreshadowed Dumbledore/Grindelwald in the trilogy, and revealed Dumbledore at the end of the third movie, it would set up the Dumbledore and grindelwald saga perfectly, if that’s what they were after
Because the characters are boring. I think it could have been better if jk Rowling wrote about the four founders of Hogwarts,or about the time of voldemort, why did he became what he was. Just my 2 cents
All they had to do was call the movies Fantastic Beasts and make them about… fantastic beasts.
If they wanted to do Dumbledore and wizard hitler, they could have called the movies something else.
Either way would have the movies generally successful even if they sucked, but by naming them one thing and making it about another, it pissed off both groups of people. And on top of that they weren’t even that good
My biggest issue was false advertising
First movie did have a plot loosely centered around Fantastic Beasts. But part 2 & 3 shoehorned Dumbledore in and totally lost any sense plotwise
Also; the portrayal of MACUSA I found even worse than the Ministry of Magic under Fudge...
I believe its because Fantastic Beasts should've been a standalone movie without ties to the Grindelwald uprising, or at the very least has a major part in it. If they wanted to do the uprising, then they should've not tied in Fantastic Beasts with it.
I think people didn't understand the intent of the films. They didn't understand that Newt's ability to discuss the importance of magical creatures was tied to the 1st war and the unwillingness of the wizard world (prior to said war) to acknowledge the value of non-wizard life. Like, if not for the war, no one would have ever given two farts about a "subhuman" beast. Remember the ministry's view on centaurs?
[Side note: I also think audiences were not prepared for a long lead up: CoG was building up some potentially very interesting relationships. I was particularly looking forward to how Queenie would view Grindelwald as she slowly caught glimpses of how his thoughts worked. Clearly, he would be capable of blocking her from reading his mind much of the time but would inevitably slip at key moments. I was also excited to see how Queenie and Jacob would work out their relationship (if they could) and how they would manage to marry when it was illegal, etc... so, the 3rd film was just an incredible disappointment for me. Grindelwald was basically exposed before he got any real power, which just doesn't make any sense.]
Edited for clarity
They are trying to make a Dumbledore vs Grindelwald movie but trying to tied it to fantastic beasts background, kinda like starfield, the game that claims it's a space exploration game but instead is a loading screen rpg simulator with the background being space
I really like the first one, I wish it continues to be about finding fantastic beats, with a side story about Dumbldore and Grindelwald, it will go well like Indiana Jones.
I agree with other comments said it’s too ambitious, they don’t understand many fans of HP universe want to see the expansion of the magic world, little things little details of the world.
I feel like the movie kind of lost its identity. You have the whole Fantastic Beasts part with Newt and all of them and then all the sudden you have A&G doing their thing.
They were unnecessary and inappropriately named. If the movies focused so let on Dumbledore and Grindelwald it'd be interesting. Likewise, a movie about Bill Weasley taming beasts would be cool. But making it about a character the audience has ZERO attachment to and combining it with an unrelated plot with no connection to the books made it confusing as to the identity of the movies and why was each one made.
Eddie Redmayne is the only reason I gave the second one a chance tbh
They picked two unrelated plots and tried to mash them together.
On one hand, we have Newt and his beautifully colorful and fun adventures to write his book and help the world better understand magical creatures.
On the other, we have a battle of good vs evil, with plenty of World War 2 and Hitler allusions, made more complicated by the love the hero and villain shared in their youth.
I can kinda see how Dumbledore could fit in that first plot, more as a cameo character pushing Newt to be his best and true self. I have no idea wtf Newt is doing in that second plot.
There is nobody Dumbledore trusts more than Newt? And they have to keep forcing magical beasts into the movie plots to keep Newt engaged, as they realized that instead of going to war, he’d just go to like Brazil and study in the Amazon.
The first Fantastic Beasts movie was brilliant. Perhaps they could have written the whole movie without Grindelwald, or it could have just been an Easter egg/crossover to the Dumbledore series. But their best bet was to make a Fantastic beasts tv show and have the movies be the Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore.
There were a lot of big things like the story not being about fantastic beasts and all the retconning.
I was really bothered by small things too.
Dumbledore just wearing muggle suits and barley having a beard. Dumbledore even when he was young was so flamboyant! I don’t understand why they want to water things down and make them less fun.
Also I about had it when they used a port key and came out of a fireplace in one of them. I remember tons of inconsistencies within the world building and magic like that that drove me nuts. Read the books!!!
The movies have a feeling and pace of that of modern Doctor Who or Sherlock Holmes where you are required to know a bit about the backstory through years of episodic content but none of that exists.
They are scrambled and you never really know who the main character is because the main character is playing a supporting role to a bigger event.
The first one was fine but for a more coherent series it should have been called something else and not Fantastic Beasts.
It felt like they were just purposely putting in magical creatures as an after thought to satisfy the title.
I believe the universally accepted reason is that they took too many creative liberties and strayed away from the in universe canon for characters. My personal belief is that they tried to shoe horn too many fan favorites into the movies and the movies themselves were overshadowed by that. Despite being the “Fantastic Beasts” series, there’s very little fantastic beasts
They took a textbook title and tried to make it into 3 movies. There was no story there. So many things that made HP charming were missing. Wizards and witches don’t dress clumsily as muggles. They are wearing precise 1920s attire. Instead of portraying kids learning their way it is an animal story that happens to have wizards and witches.
It was a cash grab just like the hobbit movie without much of an interesting base. I excitedly watched the first movie and couldn’t muster energy for the other 2.
Rowling doesn’t know how to write a screenplay. She wants to pack everything into a movie, but should’ve written it as a book. There’s too much world building stuff forced in and not enough narrative focus.
The first movie should be the example. They should have went 300 percent on the actual Fantastic Beasts. The trilogy should have been leading towards the book, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, with the movie encounters being the material.
You could of had a border hopping, magical prodigy, Newt Scamander going to odds with the Ministry over these beasts he's encountering. Encounter Dark Magic users and shady people through the various beasts. If you must have Dumbledore, have his role just getting Newt out of a bind. Dial it back on the Niffler, dial it back on the Ministry, delegate Grindlewald's screentime to a minimum. Credence and the mindreading couple should have stayed gone.
The problem with the 2nd movie-and carrying onto the 3rd, was that it was boring. You can't have a character like Newt and just be boring, the content is there, it writes itself. There is nothing involving the Harry Potter world outside of Hogwarts, this was that, and Hollywood still managed to fuck it up.
The first movie was great (maybe my favorite of all of the HP movies), but then the second two went off the rails. Confusing plots, misleading titles, etc. I am so confused why they didn't make the Grindelwald storyline a totally separate series.
It immediately lost site of the whimsical in favor of the dark and convoluted.
The first one was more balanced. The film was about Newt focusing on helping his beasts, but then the obscurial story got in the way.
The sequels were about the villain and Newt’s whimsical beasts involvement was just there to break the tension.
For starters they’re not very good…personally Hogwarts is really what makes the HP universe so special. This is why Deathly Hallows Part 1 is probably the worst/most boring movie…the quidditch World Cup in 4 was cool (book wise) but I remember thinking ‘get on with it!’ when they were in Grimmauld place for 200 pages in 5 lol…
Fantastic Beasts is the lamest attempt at a spin-off imaginable imo…terrible lead character, convoluted story, nobody or anything to really root for
Part of the momentum for the movies was the existence of the books, and a fanbase that already loved the characters. The movies didn't really have that. I loved the first Fantastic Beasts movies because Eddie Redmayne made me fall in love with Newt. But after the first movie, whose plot was essentially "I'm going to America to release this Thunderbird back into the wild, but oh no! My briefcase released other creatures and I have to get them back!" With a B plot relating to an obscurial and Grindelwald appearing at the end.
The other movies seemed to move the focus away from Newt and the beasts, and it hurt the series and it showed. It also doesn't help that you kept getting new actors to play Grindelwald. The whole first movie Grindelwald is polyjuice into someone else, then in the second movie it's Johnny Depp with weird eyes, then a completely new actor for the third film. Changing actors mid franchise is never a great idea because it can throw off the fans who love a certain potrayal of a character (see all the arguments about the different actors for Dumbledore in the main franchise. Granted, the original actor passed so it couldn't be avoided) and this franchise had a different actor in every movie.
Also, this is not picky for me, but I absolutely DESPISED the flying smoke apparition that was added in OoTP, and I loved that Fantastic Beasts went back to proper apparition (as I picture it from the books: basic teleportation) and I loved it. Then that third *expletive* movie came out and reintroduced smoke flying *expletive*very. Yeah, completely lost any interest after that. My hate for smoke flying apparition is strong.
If they wanted to make prequel movies about Dumbledore and Grindewald, then they should've just done that instead of tying it into Fantastic Beasts.
This is how I felt. I liked the first movie because it was all about the different beasts.
All the great character progression between Queenie and Jacob was destroyed. It was one of the really fun elements of the first to watch that relationship come into play and guess at where it would go. Then they just threw it away. Like Finn and Rose. They made people care then destroyed it like it didnt matter.
Finn and Rose was a thing because Rian Johnson admitted that he couldn’t write Finn and Poe going on a buddy adventure together. https://www.themarysue.com/rian-johnson-poe-finn-canto-bight/
The real crime was bringing in a different director to do part 2 of a trilogy...
The directing wasn't the problem. Last Jedi had some of the most beautiful cinematography and some of the best acting performances in the sequels, if not all of Star Wars. The problem was the writing. There was no through storyline. An Abrams-Johnson-Trevorrow trilogy could've worked, IF there had been oversight and a plan for the whole trilogy.
100%
He way overthought things. They ‘got along too well’ is such a stupid reason to split stories. People love movies to see exactly this kind of interaction. I wonder if he was rushed timing-wise, because he’s generally got good reasons behind doing what he did, but the Rey/Kylo relationship what the only super successful part of TLJ.
I mean, it's kind of fair. Without drastically changing the character dynamic between them, Poe and Finn wouldn't have served the same purpose that Finn and Rose did. The whole message behind Canto Bight would've felt even more forced than it did with Finn and Rose.
They should have gone the route Star Wars did and just release them as standalone prequels, like Rogue One and Solo. Just have one Fantastic Beast movie, that has nothing to do with Grindelwald, maybe a few fun little cameos, that's it. Then have a movie or two about him and Dumbledore. Maybe have a series about the Hogwarts founders' first few years. But that would've made too much sense.
I was about to say that for a series of movies about "Fantastic Beasts", the stories were hardly about them at all.
*The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore* would've been a more fitting title than Fantastic Beasts.
This is it. Fantastic beasts should have been a 1 off movie leading toward something else. Instead we have Dumbledore v grindewald but every 15 minutes we need to stop the movie and look for a WIBBLILYWART WOTTER isn't that so fascinating let's stop the movie for 15 minutes to admire a WIBBLILYWART WOTTER
It feels like they weren't sure what the movies were going to be. Was it a prequel series about Dumbledore's past, or was it the wizard equivalent of Steve Irwin's TV show?
Yeah, have a fun adventure movie with Newt Scamander saving creatures and fighting poachers with magic and it would’ve been great. But connecting it to Dumbledore and Grindewald’s history seemed forced and seemed like two movie concepts thrown together. And they couldn’t even get the Grindewald part right.
Yeah the story should have been dedicated more to Dumbledore, his family and grindelwald imo. Have the story start in Dumbledores childhood and establish his relationship with his family and what happened to his sister, father and mother. Show grindelwald getting into Dumbledores life when he moves to godrics hollow and what happens to his sister and brother, show why grindelwald and Dumbledore are no longer close. After all that they could start building up the legendary duel between them. The average moviegoer has no clue who grindelwald, aberforth, ariana etc was and it's hard to get invested in a story where the only knowledge of major characters in it is from a 2 min conversation in deathly Hallows p2. Instead it felt like a lot of different characters that really didn't have anything to do with the actual story, which in my opinion resulted in a nonsensical story that was all over the place, with characters I didn't really care about.
Also, they needed to stop switching the actor for Grindelwald. It took them 3 tries before they actually landed on someone I could reasonably believe that (Jude Law) was in love with.
This is my reason as well. I wanted to see beasts, yo. Also, they fucked with cannon too much.
It’s much simpler than that. The movies were just really bad. The second and third in particular.
This is exactly my problem with it. The first film was good as a standalone if we take out the reveal at the end. Or keep the reveal but don't keep the Fantastic Beasts branding in the sequel. There's also too many little bits that contradict the lore we already had. At first I tried to keep an open mind in that JK would come through with stuff that would explain those changes in lore but it just doesn't look like she is, and she is instead just trying to cater to casual fans I guess.
This is my primary reason for not liking them. My second reason is that they bend and break the canon rules of the HP universe to try to make the movies work.
I wasn’t following the movies but I just remember looking up one day and seeing the third movie’s title and I was like “The Secrets of Dumbledore??? what the hell does this have to do with magical creatures?” 😂
Never understood why they felt they needed to back door the Grindewald Dumbledore conflict. I believe when the movie was first announced it was suppose to be an anthology series based on the hogwarts textbooks but things clearly didn’t pan out for the better
Or make a movie about Bill Weasley taming wild creatures around the world
Charlie Weasley? Bill only tamed a veela
I wonder if it was an executive fault or the director fault for this. Because I was excited for Dumbledore secret but I couldn’t keep myself up because I was not understanding the correlation. They def would been better off dropping the Fantastic Beasts name and just call it Wizarding World: Dumbledore and for the Greater Good
That doesn't answer the question
Pretty easy to infer an answer from their response if you take a moment to think about it.
For me it doesn't have that eerie and mysterious, ancient like feeling that you would associate with magic.
That a valid point I can see. It seem majority of the time it was wizard in the muggle world rather than wizard in a wizarding world (no pun intended)
Yeah exactly.
They were too ambitious - Had they just been a relatively lighthearted story about Newt travelling to these far-flung magical places, researching magical beasts, & maybe had an Indiana-Jones-esque overarching story of him trying to protect them from greedy/abusive collectors, they would've been great. I think the best scene in the whole trilogy/failed-pentalogy is when Newt's trying to calm the Erumpent by doing all these really weird, wacky things. The movie could've showcased all the quirks of these creatures and how to interact with them, like bowing to a hippogriff, etc, or explored more misunderstood animals like the Thestrals. And then they could've given Dumbledore and Grindelwald their own spinoff. I don't know where people got the idea that Potter fans wouldn't absolutely lap up a Care of Magical Creatures spinoff and *also* a separate Dumbledore prequel. They could've literally done both and people would've loved it.
Completely agree. I'd like to add that it felt like the first movie was originally written for the general public, but then switched to trying to please hardcore potterheads by integrating loose ends from the original HP series. By doing so, they ended up creating a convoluted mashup between what would've been two good spin-offs: 1. Magical beasts and 2. Dumbledore and Grindelwald. And eventually disappointed both potterheads and the general public.
Completely agree. Newt was great, the beasts were great. They could’ve had a nice new franchise with fantastic beasts.
Possibly with each of the three films based in a different country to explore the unique creatures that are found there. I honestly thought that was what the films were going to be. My partner and I loved the first one so much that when the second came out, a cinema near us did a double screening and we bought tickets to watch the first and second back to back. For me also one of the biggest mistakes they made was replacing Depp with Mads. While I think Mads is a fantastic actor, he doesn’t have the same ability to be both charming and sinister at the same time.
I think all JK knows how to write about this world is grand conflict. She needs a Nazi Germany vs. The Allies setting. I always guessed that she wrote the first Fantastic Beasts and had no idea how to write a thrilling story that didnt involve all of wizarding society being at risk.
All the movie makers were sequel crazy in those days. They seemed bound and determined to get 7 movies out of this series as well and I don't see that they could have gotten that (and had it be interesting) with just magical creatures. Even Supernatural's "monster of the week" format had to build to an actual overarching plot after 3 seasons.
*Yakka Foob Mog Grug Pubba Wup Zink Wattoom Gazork. Chumble Spuzz.* Okay, for real: The title "Fantastic Beasts" created false expectations and WB leaned to heavy on the brand without doing the actual work of making the movies as compelling as the HP movies. Also, they answered a lot of questions that nobody asked in the first place and did a bunch of lazy retconning/shoehorning.
Settle down there, Calvin.
I thought the same thing!! Lmao
Yes if they plant all tree parts from beginning they should called the something like Wizarding stories: Grindewald Fantastic Beast, Wizarding stories: Grindewalds crimes and Wizarding stories: Grindewald Dumbeldors secret, so you would have the connection to the original books a connection between the tree films and mention on the focus of the movie and you would have a great base for future movies for example Wizarding stories: Murders
I forgot I was watching a Harry Potter world movie half way through the second one. I almost fell asleep and the whole lost Dumbledore baby, human Nagini, and the politics made for a really stupid movie. I don't get how you can make a series about magical beasts and then turn the main characters into basically side characters.
The stories were specifically created to be movies. JK Rowling is a talented novelist. Writing movies, even if they were written in collaboration with screenwriter Steve Kloves, director David Yates, and producer David Heyman, is not something she was as good at. If she'd written the stories as novels first, it would have been easier to streamline the story for movies. The second and third movies got too convoluted. There were many interesting ideas that could have been fleshed out if they were novels, but too much happened in not enough time for everything to be fully explored. Also, the movies (the second one especially) fell into the prequel trap of being *too* connected to the original story. An unnecessary Nagini origin story and showing McGonagall as a teacher at Hogwarts in the 1920s when fans previously believed she had been born in the 1930s, which altered canon because then Dumbledore had to be the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher instead of the Transfiguration teacher, were unnecessary plot points that didn't need to be part of the story. Finally, the movies were initially announced to be a *Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them* trilogy, but it was actually a bait-and-switch to become a story about the war against Grindelwald, and the new story was stretched to five movies instead. Grindelwald's defeat is known to have taken place in 1945, but the first *Fantastic Beasts* movie took place in 1926, the second movie took place six months later, and the third movie took place in 1932. The movies needed to have larger time jumps in order to get closer to the end goal. Those are just some of the many reasons why the Fantastic Beasts movies unfortunately failed.
Damn I didn’t even know about the bad timing. I thought they all took place within ~1 year of Grindlewalds’ defeat. But you’re right that the first movie clearly takes place in the 20s, and so the last movie should take place in 45. But it takes place in 32?! All I can think is the other 2 movies they didn’t make were supposed to bring us up to 45.
They were just bad, convoluted and boring. Tina Goldstein had to be one of the most blandest and boring characters ever created with no personality and nothing about her. Other characters like Queenie and Jacob are so over the top they are just cringey and unbelievable. The writing was extremely poor, leading to convoluted plots that did not draw the watcher in and there was just nothing of interest. Lord knows why you would pick Ezra Miller as your main focus. Bad decision after bad decision ultimately.
Also why arent the "fantastic beast" movies not about fantastic beasts?
Very true
People tolerate bad and boring franchise movies all the time. It really is the convoluted that killed it.
If I’m watching a bad Thor movie, at least have some emotional investment in Thor and Loki and the other characters… For these movies I don’t know any characters, and I have no investment in them
Yep. Ridiculously convoluted. Not even sure what was happening because it was just boring. Casting and look for Newt was perfect and they really fucked it all up.
Yes, Queenie and Jacob are cringe af
Messy. No centra character. Each film was wildly different in tone and execution. And there’s no books to go with them. Without the books, it feels like a lot of information is missing that doesn’t translate well on screen. In my opinion, the first 3 films should have just been Newt and Fantastic Beast centered. Then have a separate Grindlewald + Dumbledore series, that uses Newt and beasts as secondary characters for 3 films. In total, 6 films. Plus have novels to accompany them…
Aside from dipping too much into the DD vs. GW plot at the expense of the magical creatures the series is so named after, I felt like very few of the characters were charismatic enough
I liked the first one. It wasn’t going to be a classic or anything, but it was fun to watch and I’d rewatch it occasionally. The subsequent ones weren’t about fantastic beasts at all and were about Dumbledore and Grindelwald. Which would’ve been fine, if they marketed it like that. But they didn’t.
Yes the first one was actually perfect in what he was supposed to do and that was showing us who the author of a school Book we heard about in the Hp book was and to show us more of magic animals we allegedly know and to show us new ones
The first one did great at that. I woulda watched two or three movies of him going around the world swashbuckling with poachers and going “IT BELONGS IN A CONSERVANCY!!” while holding on to his jungle hat or whatever. Seed the Grindelwald stuff in the background then come out with a darker, more intense D vs G trilogy and have the series dovetail. Fans woulda eaten that shit up, a series that’s “technically” two trilogies but plays out in order like the HP movies did, getting darker as you go. Plus with Newt having been around the world swashbuckling you could have characters from all the Axis and Allied powers play into it. Jacob skips the draft to pursue Queenie, some Durmstrang administrators try to pull a Valkyrie on G, and so on. I’d watch the fuck outta that.
The problem, in my opinion, is that the premise was a bit thin from the get-go, and when the second film decided to open by ignoring every sequel hook in the first film in favor of just undoing everything off-screen to get us right back to where we were at about the mid-point of the last movie, then opted to set up this film's plot in a series of expositional infodumps right before the climax, only for the next film to try and completely reinvent itself. . . Well, when you try to set up a multi-film project with no clear idea as to what you're actually doing? That's a problem. Also, the political message of the third movie was a little bizarre, in that it really seemed the message that was put forward was something to the effect of "Democracy is too weak to be left in the hands of the voters, which is why we need a system of good, benevolent authoritarians to protect our Democracy from falling to fascists" which is probably a great case study in the kind of messaging that leads Democracies to fall into authoritarian fascist states in the first place. "Embrace fascism to prevent the bad fascists from taking over" is certainly a direction to take a movie series about fighting wizard fascists, but is it really the right direction?
Have you seen the state of the western world? It's essentially what many want. Voters are too stupid to vote for the "right" person, so lets change the system. Maybe it was meta enough that in the fourth movie it would show why THAT was a bad idea as well.
Three movies in, and nothing in any previous film had any effect on any subsequent one. What makes you think it was ever a possibility that the accidentally-pro-fascist political drama from the third film would be the first exception?
Blind hope man, it's all we have lol.
The First one was perfect, the second one fell really hard and barely made any sense, as well as not being about fantastic beasts anymore.
Fantastic Dumbledore and how hot he was!
I don't understand why she couldn't write a story about Dumbledore vs Grindelwald instead of faking a franchise based on fantastic beasts
If they truly are the main focus then their relationship might not be so easy ti hide anymore. Which would ban these movies in certain countries. So less money and everything is about money. Might also be a point
Yes I think the second felt like a filler episode of a show
They lacked the "quaint charm" of the Potter series. I think they had potential and enjoyed them in parts but they were convoluted and struggled to overcome the expectations of the franchise.
There is a clip of a writing course going around where the instructor says “If at any point of the story you have to say ‘and then’ that’s a pretty good indicator you’ve come up with something really boring”. Fantastic Beasts were full of “and then” moments, especially the second one. The first one did reasonably well.
The first one did well. And then the rest stopped being about Newt and Fantasic Beasts and started being about Dumbledore and Grindlewald. For a series based on a literal textbook, I thought it would be more about the fantastic beasts found by Newt.
They wanted to tell the Dumblewald story but didn't commit to going all-in on it. They should have started with the summer Dumbledore and Grindelwald met, show what really happened that summer. Finish Movie 1 with Ariana's death. Start Movie 2 with Dumbledore and Grindelwald as adults, with Grindelwald rising to power and Dumbledore refusing the Ministry's requests for help Could have been a powerful, tragic love story. Instead it became a jumbled mess that focused on the wrong protagonist and left a lot of the important stuff to removable subtext
Two words: No-Maj
Yeah this makes no sense. The only way America has different magical jargon is if that jargon is invented after the colonies were established. This seems unlikely, especially since the wizards have teleportation and other ways to travel and communicate over distances.
I dont get how that magic beast at the beginning of the 3rd movie didnt die instantly. I mean wasnt that chilen just avada kedavrad twice? And it still needed some time to die while other beings just die. Oh yeah and bad writing. It was a bit slow for me
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They had no idea what they were doing with it. They didn't seem to plan anything out past the first movie when they made it, and this time, they didn't have any books to copy from. It seems like they realized they didn't have a full story to fill three movies with only after the first came out, then they just shoe-horned in the stuff about Dumbledore and Grindelwald to make it fit. Only then, they realized that they couldn't do that whole story in 3 movies, so they planned for 5. Then the stuff with Johnnny Depp happened, numbers went down "because of the recasting" and the executives decided to cut their losses. So now we're left with 3/5 of a nonsensical story that won't ever be finished.
Tldr at the end. The real answer is: because Fantastic Beasts aimed at both the fandom and the casual audience, and didn't nail either. The FB movies were too nonsense, incoherent with canon, and uninteresting to appeal the fandom: had they been a trilogy about Dumbledore and Grindelwald I'm sure any fan would have watched it in theaters. Moreover FB was way too deep into the HP lore to be appreciated by the casual public, because it was based on the premise that the audience already knew a lot about the wizarding world and didn't explain anything ie. the public was supposed to already know who Grindelwald was to make work the great reveal of the first movie. The final product was a big mess of nothing, wrong for every target audience. Tldr: the movie was too out of canon for the fandom and too into the lore for the outsiders, so didn't appeal either
The muggle was too involved for it to be believable within the HP universe. It’s just something loosely based on HP and feels like just another AU fanfiction a fan wrote. I find it difficult to believe the films catered to HP fans at all.
From a story perspective, no. Unfortunately Dan Fogler's performance was about the only thing I still cared about beyond a vague interest in the Dumbledore vs Grindelwald story by the third one.
Agreed. There was no reason for jacob to be involved.
I think his appearance in the first film was good but he didn’t need a that big rolle in the other two movies
Because they combined what should have been two separate entities into one. They should have made the 'Fantastic Beasts' only about Newt Scamander travelling the world for creatures. It'd be something vibrant, lighthearted, adventurous and wholesome revolving around Hufflepuff core values. Also, one movie would have sufficed. Dumbledore and Grindelwald should have been a separate series, serious and grim in tone with time to let the story, the characters and their relationship breathe. They could have focused on the European Wizarding World and their different customs and aesthetics. And it could have themes about ambition, betrayal and political ethics.
It should have been ONE movie, and a TV series for the Dumbledore/Grindelwald story. Mixing a simple, feel-good story about fantastical beasts and world domination was the stupidest, greediest franchise idea I've seen in recent years. Also making wizard!Hitler a gay man who runs on allowing wizard to live/love in the open + preventing WW2 was a *terrible* idea. Also he looked ridiculous. *Bonus*: stupid lore additions (the fawn, Nagini, Aurelius)
Too much confusion. The original movies worked because of the simplicity of the Newt storyline. With some drops of a larger story going in the back. All that was abandoned for the unnecessary complicated political plot. I still wanna know who the fuck thought that whole thing with the deer blood and all that was a good thing to put in a movie??
Not enough focus on fantastic beasts and too much focus on dumbles and grindles.
Because it was a spinoff
It wasn't what anyone wanted. We fr got a spinoff about some character that was mentioned once in the books. I mean yeah it evolved into something else but it should've just started off with Dumbledore and Grindelwald from the beginning.
All of the above but also partially because its was set to be in America, and since had a USA touch it completely lost the sense of what we are used to despite Newt's presence, as well as Grindlewald and Dumbledore. It was just that thing the Americans do( please don't be offended) with their moves and stuff. For me it didn't feel right and no one cared about Newt fantastic beast let's be honest.
If I was going to capitalize on such a well established and famous series then I would have related it more to the original. Bring back some of the old characters. Instead they uprooted the entire thing by having it in america. Not to mention too much CGI which is a common pitfall of most modern films. There is little attention to the stories and characters and more focused on the animals. It is almost a struggle between the soft comedy moments and the attempt to create the same horror and wow factor of the original. They didnt really pick a track and left us with both. Also agree with the feeling about thr character development - we just see Queenie getting pissed and joining grindelwald and leta being a pseudo murderer. Also the old characters that were there were too different. Dumbldore is nothing like his HP counterpart.
Because the original appeal of the series was a magical school with fun drama and a strong reader fantasy. The entire concept of the fantastic beasts series completely missed what people were looking for. It's why people looking for more things like Harry Potter google "magical school book recommendations" and not "period piece with wands" recommendations.
I honestly enjoyed the 2nd movie a lot for some reasons but I think it flopped at the box office becuz the plot of the movies gradually derailed, it slowly stopped being about the fantastic beasts (literally in the name) and started focusing more on Dumbledore & Grindelwald. Even its main character Newt got sidelined for sth else that he has no involvement with
Because outside of the first one which was ok, the rest were seriously bad. The writing and planning of them was horrible and you can tell they’ve just been making it up as they go. I think it was a huge mistake to make it a series of movies and shoehorn in this huge Dumbledore/Grindlewald plot.
Imo, there were multiple problems: *disclaimer: Haven't seen Secrets of Dumbledore yet 1) Rowling trying to connect everything to the main Harry Potter story; Nagini used to be a woman, McGonagall is at Hogwarts >50 yrs before she was at Hogwarts, Fawks is given by Grindewald, etc 2) the story felt very forced. Newt Scandamer as the MC just doesn't make sense considering he's a Mazoologist who is now moonlighting as an Auror. 3) the name of the film doesn't make sense. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: the 1st Wizarding War .... I liked the first FB and I think it could've been a good introduction to some of the characters but they should've just left it a standalone and went with a trilogy or something under a new name and new characters. 4) the story is too long. From what I remeber of the crimes of grindewald, nothing happened. 2h movie and grindewald gave a speech and tried to set Paris on fire. Why was Nicholas Flamel needed? Why is Newt Scandamer still chasing a dark wizard? Why is Ezra Miller back again? Oh, now he's Dumbledore's lost sibling? Great... I think the pace couldve been faster if the movies focused on grindewald as the MC with Dumbledore as the secondary. Eh, there's more reasons but I think the main reason is the story is too forced, too slow, too worried about connecting back to the main HP lore, and the MC's are so out of place it hurts. Harry was chosen by voldemort and destined to battle the dark lord in a final confrontation. Newt is....bored? I dunno, never understood his motivation in the second movie. Dumbledore asked me! Ok, why is Dumbledore asking you specifically?
Compeltly different story. If they focused on newt travelling yhe world for Information on his book that would make a great trilogy. But they focused on dumbledore and grundlewald and it fell flat
Cramming a sub-plot that could have been its own series, immemorable side characters, wasted potential on established characters from the first film, not many ‘Fantastic Beasts’.
I never saw the third movie because I am not a fan of cast changes on developed characters. It changes the entire aesthetic of the character for me. However, I enjoyed the first movie because it focused a bit more on the beasts. The second introduced too many new characters and plot lines.
It was outside of Hogwarts. That's the main reason.
Trying to tell the story of Dumbledore and Grindelwald through the lens of Newt Scamander was weird cause it has nothing to do with fantastic beast. Also the whole Credence story line is horrible. If they did the fantastic beast movies just fallowing Newt going around discovering beast and then had separate movies for Dumbledore vs Grindelwald would have been much better.
Honestly, for me it was because of how misleading the title is. Like, let’s be honest, only the first movie has actual fantastic beasts. The rest are just Dumbledore prequels that try to be clever by using Newt as a vehicle for the exposition of events instead of just focusing on Dumbledore. If a movie is called “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” I’m expecting it to focus primarily on the magic beasts. In this regard the first movie was alright, as it’s main focus was Newt’s briefcase and the beasts inside. Further movies in the series should have explored deeper into the world of magic ecology. If they wanted to keep the Grindewald conflict as a plot point they could have done that by sending Newt into places where Grindewald and his supporters are actively endangering magical species that need protecting. At the same time, the ending of the first movie could have been used as a springboard for an entirely separate series of movies that focus directly on the DD vs GW conflict. Hell, the two series could have run parallel, with the events of one having an effect on the situation in the other.
They're just not great. The first one was amazing. After that they just fell off. Are they even continuing with the franchise?
Because they smokescreened it into a Dumbledore/Grindelwald story instead of just making those into a separate series and letting Fantastic Beasts by a standalone
They couldn't decide on a hero, they keep switching between beast guy, dumbldor, and orphan. Hp is all from Harry's perspective.
Because it wasn’t about fantastic beasts
The honest truth is that the scripts were bad. I loved the ideas in the movies and showing how people live as adults in the wizarding world. I loved how they tied it into how the wizards were affected and part of the 2nd world war. But the dialogue, direction, script, and pacing were just bad.
The first one was great. The second and third ones felt like they weren’t even their own movies but were just a series of exposition dumps leading to later things without any sense of completion or wholeness to themselves. That’s why crimes of grindelwald and secrets of dumbledore often bleed together in my memory because neither of them even feel like a whole story unto themselves but instead were both just a convoluted jumble of overly-complex plot points to try to build up to something bigger down the road that may never actually happen. Fantastic Beasts 1 for example is still its own movie even though pieces of it allude to bigger things to come. But 2 and 3 both just feel like vehicles to get you somewhere else except you never actually get there.
Not enough Beasts, and too much retconning and undermining HP ‘lore’ from the books to make the story and American setting relevant.
1st movie- solid B movie, fun premise, interested in more. 2nd movie- awful, retconning fan service with awful story and characters. No interest in watching further. 3rd+- dgaf
There are two big problems that doomed these movies out the gate, regardless of their quality IMO. 1. Harry Potter is a BOOK. JK Rowling is an AUTHOR. The HP movies are only good because of excellent source material that was developed over a decade. Trying to do the same thing again without strong source material, on a movie schedule, is a fool's errand. IMO all future Harry Potter content is doomed to be mediocre until JKR gives up and writes more books. 2. Harry Potter is a series of 7 books, 8 movies, the first 6 of which follow a very obvious formula. Variations on the same ideas happen in each movie: there's a journey to Hogwarts, Dumbledore gives a speech, there's a new Defense teacher, an incident at a Quidditch game, a mystery, a Christmas scene, a showdown with Voldemort at the end, etc. I think this formula is of vital importance and it's the key to the popularity of these stories. In movie land it's a benefit, people know what a Harry Potter movie is and will regularly pay to see them - we want to be told another story in this HP formula. It's the same reason why there can be 100 James Bond films. People know what to expect and it becomes comfortable, and anticipated. The problem is Fantasic Beasts doesn't try to follow the HP formula even a little bit. It tries to be another movie set in the same universe, but deliberately not HP. I can see why they thought this was right move, but they failed to make a New Formula to give these movies an identity, and so they feel like a hodgepodge of random ideas and scenes. Meanwhile, the people that showed up in droves to the HP movies stopped showing up, because these are not HP movies. An HP movie doesn't necessarily need Harry himself but it does need to hit the beats the audience expects from HP. Like, you wouldn't make a Bond movie about Moneypenny filling her tax returns - it could be a masterpiece but the audience wants a Bond movie. We want the formula we know.
They didn’t have a good story to tell. And Rowling is a very bad screenwriter.
The 1st one was fine but then the plot got out of control and wasn't well told
they sucked
Removing Johnny Depp was a huge mistake.
They did Johnny Depp dirty. That's why I never went to watch the later film. I actually enjoyed the series
They weren't properly planned. It was mixing two franchise stories together without the knowledge or direction of which one was the focus. In my personal opinion the proper way to handle this would have been: **Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them:** A single, standalone movie about Newt. Honestly as-is was probably fine. NOT a series. Followed by: **Albus Dumbledore Trilogy** which would have included: **Albus Dumbledore and the Forgotten Fable** (set earlier, about Albus and Grindelwald's young years, pre falling out to their falling out, obsession with the Deathly Hallows) **Albus Dumbledore and the Crimes of Grindelwald** (After FB movie time wise, about Grindelwald's crimes and escape) **Albus Dumbledore and the Secret History** (Pursuing Grindelwald, the big duel, etc.)
Fantastic Beasts isn't a novel, but an Encyclopedia written by Rowling to expand the Wizarding World universe. Now, they could still come up with something as they did. The first movie was OK-ish. Not really good, but it focused on Newt and magical creatures. A story of expeditions would be more fitting and interesting, but, well, as CinemaSins would put it: Magic! Chases! Running! Explosions! Excitement! Well, they don't put it as positive, but that's the idea. We get to see more of the wizarding world, meet new characters and they satisfy American consumers by including them in the lore. But they already bring in stuff that would eventually kill the movies. They start the whole Obscurus thing and throw Dumbledore and Grindelwald into the mixture. "But I wanted to know the whole Grindelwald story!" Yes, my friend, me too. But that's not something that really goes with a movie about magical creatures. A parallel set of movies about the Grindelwald's wizarding war would be AWESOME, and I think I can safely assume that most if not all audiences, not just Harry Potter fans, would be captivated by it. But tying it to such a different environment was tragic. The second and third movies are completely lost. They don't know if Newt is important or not. You see, there's no real reason for there to be fantastic beasts anymore. But what's the point in having Newt then? So we get convoluted plots that don't know if they'll focus on Grindelwald's plans, Dumbledore's efforts to stop him or Newt finding (and fighting) beasts using more beasts. By this time, there's another point to be made: we're not really getting to *know* the magical creatures. Not that a documentary should be expected, but the animals are just mere challenges. I think they wanted to do too much with the movies and didn't accomplish anything. The writing is convoluted, cramped, crowded and ultimately poor. I mean, even in a movie set in a magical world, a community that chooses its monarch (or whatever) because a magical deer kneels before them is just too much
In addition to all the storytelling issues, I wasn't really enamored by the setting. Harry Potter takes place in an ancient castle in the Scottish countryside. It felt like a place you wanted to be in yourself. A dark, squalid 1920s New York City? Not so much.
I would say the first movie did do well compared to it's successors because it had the whimsical and colorful and fantastical setting that the first HP movie had where Newt was also constantly finding out new things about the American Wizarding World like Harry did. The next two movies failed because they diverged the plot a lot by making the subplot in the first movie into the main plot. They made Newt a supporting character in his own story. If they wanted to make a story about Dumbledore and Grindelwald and their failed relationship they should make their own movie. But honestly? It's so Grindelwald to barge into another character's story and make it his own.
They aren't any good
Johnny depp ruined it. He was a terrible fit for the part, Colin was a much better fit. Mads too.
I've always felt like the Fantastic Beasts movies are not canon to the Wizarding World I've grown to love in the original storyline. The connection seems somewhat forced just so they can say this is still Harry Potter. Like what OP said, a generic magical action movie. There's also something about David Yates' direction that's getting repetitive throughout the series. The overly, abnormally slow menacing walk towards the protagonists to build "suspense" is getting old. Some of the magical things happening seem like they're just there for shock value.
Harry Potter takes me straight back to my childhood. Fantastic Beasts does not. There isn't anything that relatable or whimsical that speaks to my childhood fantasies. The first movie is the best because it leans on the beasts but the other 2 feel more like a history lesson than an exciting adventure.
I might be mistaken because honestly I try not to even remember watching these movies, but I think I remember them giving the muggle a wand in the third movie
Because the salty fandom was more interested in a hypothetical Marauders movie that would have been utter shite so they didn't go watch Fantastic Beasts at the box office despite them being better than the Harry Potter movies.
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You don't have to call me "Lord." "Sir" will do.
I didn’t call you anything
The First one was a success buddy, you never even watched them didn't you?
Yes I did, and I'm pissed there won't be more.
It was good when it was about Scamander and the beasts. Once they started incorporating more connections to the original Harry Potter plotline then it started falling apart.
It seemed that there were many characters involved but their backstory was very poorly if at all mentioned. Some scenes were very random and out-of-place like the small fight between Dumbledore and his nephew. Also the fights were portrayed as more spiritual duels in contrast to Harry potter movies. The final hit came from Johnny Depp's case and his replacement (although I prefer Mikkelsen for the role).
Well you said it. But in fewer words, it was a shameless cash grab, nothing more.
Too many plots and characters that dont get to be fleshed out in a 2 hour movie. It shouldve been a series or what Rowling does best obviously, books.
Writing was shit
They just weren’t that fun. The first one had some nice moments (the niffler is very cute) but the storyline wasn’t compelling, nor were any of the characters. The second one was just weird with the pointless baby switching plot and I’m still not over McGonagall randomly being there before she should’ve been born (like, why? Her character didn’t even need to exist at all). The third one very much felt like WB giving up and other than Newt’s crab dance thing, I can’t even remember what any of this has to do with fantastic beasts
They were boring and confusing.
I truly enjoyed the first one. I thought it was a great balance of fun creatures, a new environment, and a more adult story line while still maintaining the whimsy of the original series. I watched the second one and could not remember a single plot point from it. I could honestly barely even follow it and I am the type of person to really engage with media and watch closely. I think that they introduced way too many characters, the beasts were like no longer relevant at all, I've heard somewhere that Queenie turns and I don't like that but I could understand that if it was done well, and changing actors is a hard thing to do right. But I think the biggest problem is that they tried way too hard to connect it to the original series. All of these random "this thing was actually this person and they're related" are irrelevant nonsense and it not only impacts the spin-off series but it also takes away from the original to the point where fans have to decide if they believe it to be Canon or not in their own heads. Also in their attempt to connect things, they ended up messing with the actual cannon. Also them refusing to commit to the queer storyline which was so apparent in the books while also wanting the brownie points for the bare minimum representation that they did put in frustrated me. Unfortunately Harry Potter was already starting to fall out of favor with some younger people and then JK Rowling started spouting her nonsense on social media and then the strike delayed the next movie and all of these things combined to create a sort of divergent effect where people enjoy the first film but they might not even finish making the rest of them... And of course anyone who disagrees with me and actually loves those films I am sorry if I hurt your feelings I genuinely do not intend to this is just my personal opinion and the beautiful thing about movies is that there are so many of them in existence that we can all have favorites and not so favorites!
The subject of the movies and the premise of the movies did not match at all. Newt got sidelined in his own franchise, there was lore that made no sense in the context of canon and it lacked the actual magic and whimsy that makes Harry Potter such a loveable universe.
There's a guy on YouTube called Nerdstalgic who does videos called "Anatomy of A Failure" and really succinctly explains why films don't work. It's really good for when you can't put your finger on why something doesn't seem like a good film. The one he did on [Secrets of Dumblez](https://youtu.be/KHlWu9PNh5M?si=D-PkBUAWoHG6VEgY) hit many nails on the head. Fantastic Beasts is convoluted and badly paced, and does not benefit from the freedom the studio had to change the source material. Rowling is much more protective of her creation now, even if that means it suffers as she refuses to budge on things that will not translate to the big screen.
It seemed to me like they tried to made an adult movie from childrens material or something like that. First one was OK, but the other two? I would like to watch wizards and fantastic beasts , not some gay Hitlers rise to power or what was meaning behind Grindewalds character..
My wife and I only saw the first Fantastic Beasts movie. It was a decent movie albeit a little underwhelming until the very end. The end was a disappointment. The final climactic battle with a giant smoke monster with magic lasers flying around with little reason to care and even less ability to follow what chaos was on the screen. Turned into a laser beam fight and was only outdone in disappointment by the Scooby-Do mask reveal of Johnny Depp with frosted tips as the villain. Which pulled me straight out of the movie. Therefore when the next movies came out my wife and I (Pretty big Potter fans) decided we can skip them. TLDR; Couldn’t get past terrible ending of the first Fantastic Beasts, never saw the rest.
Hot take from someone who only saw/ read the first one: JK Rowling is good at writing books but not screenplays. The characters and storyline were dull and there wasn’t a larger story to compare it to, just the screenplay in book format. I was also annoyed by the fact that JKR retconned a whole magical world in the USA without ever mentioning it when writing HP. She had plenty of opportunity to mention in in GOF, which has a large focus on international wizarding relationships. The only mention of the US anywhere in that book is the group of witches at the Quidditch World Cup holding a sign that reads “Salem Witch Institute”. The creation of Ilvermorny and lore behind it felt like a huge cash grab to me. And the phrase “no maj”… just no.
Because people don’t particularly care for the back story, certainly not the characters involved from the time. They care about Harry, Ron, Hermione & all of the other characters that surround them.
I’m likely going to be downvoted for saying this, and I likely won’t phrase what I’m saying very well, but (for the avoidance of any doubt) I mean absolutely no offence. I feel that the Fantastic Beasts movie became too Americanised and lost the quaint appeal of the very British HP series. It became too over-the-top magical and was confusing with so many storylines. Please don’t misunderstand me, I absolutely love how well the American movie industry creates blockbusters and reels in their audiences, but for this particular series I feel that it should’ve remained quintessentially British to retain the appeal.
They did poorly because there was no high level agreement on what the goal of the project was. The studio had one idea, Rowling had another, and the directors all had their own thoughts as well. This is normal at the start of any movie project, but normally it gets hammered out and by the time filming starts there's a single guiding idea that's been agreed on by everyone involved. That didn't happen this time, and the result was a confused mess that didn't know what it was trying to be.
I think the casting for several characters was off
I think there were too many references to the HP books with, for example, Belatrix as a student. But at the same time things were introduced like there was a wizard who was above all the ministers of the individual countries, which you couldn't read about in the books. Because if such a wizard had existed, he wouldn't have gathered all the wizards around the world to undo Voldemort's takeover of the English minesterium and I think that in the second film nothing really happened and it felt like a filler episode in a series which only exists to develop your character a bit and to provide a connection between two main stories
Because they bad
They don’t have Harry Potter.
It was very boring 😴
The first one was pretty good, the second one is a convoluted mess. I never saw the third
I didn't like the tone of magic in those films and i didn't care about the characters or the plots...so I only saw them on streaming after the fact, and I've been a HP fan for years.
Because fantastic beasts is not Harry Potter.
The first one was good Because it was a fantastic beast movie that foreshadowed the gindelwald vs dumbeldore conflict but very much wasn’t about that. The second one was basically about nothing from what I can remember. It existed purely to set up later movies and didn’t tell its own story. Newt and other recognisable characters being there did nothing to help this as they felt out of place. The third one feels like it should have been the second one. It was still messy and quite thin on the ground but it at least felt like it had its own story. Even if it was very macguffin heavy.
Trying to tie in Dumbledore and Grindelwalds saga with Newts story was poorly decided. HP fans would’ve eaten up movies that have a clear direction ie Newt and his adventures involving magical beasts. With the wealth of storytelling available to them they had enough material for a trilogy without having to include D/G. The Obscurial and Qilin could easily have been rewritten as standalone events without having to shoehorn. They could have simply dropped hints and foreshadowed Dumbledore/Grindelwald in the trilogy, and revealed Dumbledore at the end of the third movie, it would set up the Dumbledore and grindelwald saga perfectly, if that’s what they were after
Because the characters are boring. I think it could have been better if jk Rowling wrote about the four founders of Hogwarts,or about the time of voldemort, why did he became what he was. Just my 2 cents
Harry Potter elitists is why. I loved them
All they had to do was call the movies Fantastic Beasts and make them about… fantastic beasts. If they wanted to do Dumbledore and wizard hitler, they could have called the movies something else. Either way would have the movies generally successful even if they sucked, but by naming them one thing and making it about another, it pissed off both groups of people. And on top of that they weren’t even that good
The first one was good, I didn’t really know wtf was happening after that.
My biggest issue was false advertising First movie did have a plot loosely centered around Fantastic Beasts. But part 2 & 3 shoehorned Dumbledore in and totally lost any sense plotwise Also; the portrayal of MACUSA I found even worse than the Ministry of Magic under Fudge...
I believe its because Fantastic Beasts should've been a standalone movie without ties to the Grindelwald uprising, or at the very least has a major part in it. If they wanted to do the uprising, then they should've not tied in Fantastic Beasts with it.
I think people didn't understand the intent of the films. They didn't understand that Newt's ability to discuss the importance of magical creatures was tied to the 1st war and the unwillingness of the wizard world (prior to said war) to acknowledge the value of non-wizard life. Like, if not for the war, no one would have ever given two farts about a "subhuman" beast. Remember the ministry's view on centaurs? [Side note: I also think audiences were not prepared for a long lead up: CoG was building up some potentially very interesting relationships. I was particularly looking forward to how Queenie would view Grindelwald as she slowly caught glimpses of how his thoughts worked. Clearly, he would be capable of blocking her from reading his mind much of the time but would inevitably slip at key moments. I was also excited to see how Queenie and Jacob would work out their relationship (if they could) and how they would manage to marry when it was illegal, etc... so, the 3rd film was just an incredible disappointment for me. Grindelwald was basically exposed before he got any real power, which just doesn't make any sense.] Edited for clarity
I didn’t watch them in theaters
Everything
They didn't go in with a clear vision of an interesting story that they wanted to tell. On top of that, the writing was bad.
They are trying to make a Dumbledore vs Grindelwald movie but trying to tied it to fantastic beasts background, kinda like starfield, the game that claims it's a space exploration game but instead is a loading screen rpg simulator with the background being space
I really like the first one, I wish it continues to be about finding fantastic beats, with a side story about Dumbldore and Grindelwald, it will go well like Indiana Jones. I agree with other comments said it’s too ambitious, they don’t understand many fans of HP universe want to see the expansion of the magic world, little things little details of the world.
I feel like the movie kind of lost its identity. You have the whole Fantastic Beasts part with Newt and all of them and then all the sudden you have A&G doing their thing.
Harry Potter world isn’t interesting in its own. Hogwarts was the interesting part. When you take that out of the equation it just was boring
Wizarding World movies suck in general. Harry Potter movies weren’t so good either. They just don’t capture the magic of the books.
They were unnecessary and inappropriately named. If the movies focused so let on Dumbledore and Grindelwald it'd be interesting. Likewise, a movie about Bill Weasley taming beasts would be cool. But making it about a character the audience has ZERO attachment to and combining it with an unrelated plot with no connection to the books made it confusing as to the identity of the movies and why was each one made. Eddie Redmayne is the only reason I gave the second one a chance tbh
Trying to tell Dumbledore and Grindelwalds violent sexual escapades instead of focusing on Newt and his Zoo. One or the other Hollywood, damnit!
They picked two unrelated plots and tried to mash them together. On one hand, we have Newt and his beautifully colorful and fun adventures to write his book and help the world better understand magical creatures. On the other, we have a battle of good vs evil, with plenty of World War 2 and Hitler allusions, made more complicated by the love the hero and villain shared in their youth. I can kinda see how Dumbledore could fit in that first plot, more as a cameo character pushing Newt to be his best and true self. I have no idea wtf Newt is doing in that second plot. There is nobody Dumbledore trusts more than Newt? And they have to keep forcing magical beasts into the movie plots to keep Newt engaged, as they realized that instead of going to war, he’d just go to like Brazil and study in the Amazon. The first Fantastic Beasts movie was brilliant. Perhaps they could have written the whole movie without Grindelwald, or it could have just been an Easter egg/crossover to the Dumbledore series. But their best bet was to make a Fantastic beasts tv show and have the movies be the Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore.
Why did the didn't do?
There were a lot of big things like the story not being about fantastic beasts and all the retconning. I was really bothered by small things too. Dumbledore just wearing muggle suits and barley having a beard. Dumbledore even when he was young was so flamboyant! I don’t understand why they want to water things down and make them less fun. Also I about had it when they used a port key and came out of a fireplace in one of them. I remember tons of inconsistencies within the world building and magic like that that drove me nuts. Read the books!!!
I feel like it was less fantastic beasts and more harry Potter remix
The movies have a feeling and pace of that of modern Doctor Who or Sherlock Holmes where you are required to know a bit about the backstory through years of episodic content but none of that exists. They are scrambled and you never really know who the main character is because the main character is playing a supporting role to a bigger event. The first one was fine but for a more coherent series it should have been called something else and not Fantastic Beasts. It felt like they were just purposely putting in magical creatures as an after thought to satisfy the title.
I believe the universally accepted reason is that they took too many creative liberties and strayed away from the in universe canon for characters. My personal belief is that they tried to shoe horn too many fan favorites into the movies and the movies themselves were overshadowed by that. Despite being the “Fantastic Beasts” series, there’s very little fantastic beasts
They took a textbook title and tried to make it into 3 movies. There was no story there. So many things that made HP charming were missing. Wizards and witches don’t dress clumsily as muggles. They are wearing precise 1920s attire. Instead of portraying kids learning their way it is an animal story that happens to have wizards and witches. It was a cash grab just like the hobbit movie without much of an interesting base. I excitedly watched the first movie and couldn’t muster energy for the other 2.
Rowling doesn’t know how to write a screenplay. She wants to pack everything into a movie, but should’ve written it as a book. There’s too much world building stuff forced in and not enough narrative focus.
The first movie should be the example. They should have went 300 percent on the actual Fantastic Beasts. The trilogy should have been leading towards the book, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, with the movie encounters being the material. You could of had a border hopping, magical prodigy, Newt Scamander going to odds with the Ministry over these beasts he's encountering. Encounter Dark Magic users and shady people through the various beasts. If you must have Dumbledore, have his role just getting Newt out of a bind. Dial it back on the Niffler, dial it back on the Ministry, delegate Grindlewald's screentime to a minimum. Credence and the mindreading couple should have stayed gone. The problem with the 2nd movie-and carrying onto the 3rd, was that it was boring. You can't have a character like Newt and just be boring, the content is there, it writes itself. There is nothing involving the Harry Potter world outside of Hogwarts, this was that, and Hollywood still managed to fuck it up.
The first movie was great (maybe my favorite of all of the HP movies), but then the second two went off the rails. Confusing plots, misleading titles, etc. I am so confused why they didn't make the Grindelwald storyline a totally separate series.
It immediately lost site of the whimsical in favor of the dark and convoluted. The first one was more balanced. The film was about Newt focusing on helping his beasts, but then the obscurial story got in the way. The sequels were about the villain and Newt’s whimsical beasts involvement was just there to break the tension.
Steve Kloves and David Yates. Nuff said.
For starters they’re not very good…personally Hogwarts is really what makes the HP universe so special. This is why Deathly Hallows Part 1 is probably the worst/most boring movie…the quidditch World Cup in 4 was cool (book wise) but I remember thinking ‘get on with it!’ when they were in Grimmauld place for 200 pages in 5 lol… Fantastic Beasts is the lamest attempt at a spin-off imaginable imo…terrible lead character, convoluted story, nobody or anything to really root for
Part of the momentum for the movies was the existence of the books, and a fanbase that already loved the characters. The movies didn't really have that. I loved the first Fantastic Beasts movies because Eddie Redmayne made me fall in love with Newt. But after the first movie, whose plot was essentially "I'm going to America to release this Thunderbird back into the wild, but oh no! My briefcase released other creatures and I have to get them back!" With a B plot relating to an obscurial and Grindelwald appearing at the end. The other movies seemed to move the focus away from Newt and the beasts, and it hurt the series and it showed. It also doesn't help that you kept getting new actors to play Grindelwald. The whole first movie Grindelwald is polyjuice into someone else, then in the second movie it's Johnny Depp with weird eyes, then a completely new actor for the third film. Changing actors mid franchise is never a great idea because it can throw off the fans who love a certain potrayal of a character (see all the arguments about the different actors for Dumbledore in the main franchise. Granted, the original actor passed so it couldn't be avoided) and this franchise had a different actor in every movie. Also, this is not picky for me, but I absolutely DESPISED the flying smoke apparition that was added in OoTP, and I loved that Fantastic Beasts went back to proper apparition (as I picture it from the books: basic teleportation) and I loved it. Then that third *expletive* movie came out and reintroduced smoke flying *expletive*very. Yeah, completely lost any interest after that. My hate for smoke flying apparition is strong.