How far along is Fantastic Beasts 4? We talk about whether or not there will be a fourth movie in the Wizarding World franchise or if it has been canceled.
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) tried to bring back the Harry Potter franchise after the last movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, came out in 2011. The first Fantastic Beasts movie came out in 2016, and the second one came out in 2017. People were expecting a single sin-off based on the book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but instead they were surprised to meet Grindelwald, a bad wizard who lived before Harry Potter.
It turned out that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was the first film in a five-part prequel series. It showed the build-up to the famous duel between Albus Dumbledore and his ex-lover Grindelwald, which was hinted at in the Harry Potter books. More installments are planned. But now that the third movie is out of theaters, the Fantastic Beasts franchise is in bad shape. There are a number of things that have led to this.
What is the status of Fantastic Beasts 4?
Fans of the first three Fantastic Beasts movies will be sad to hear that there won’t be a fourth one. In November 2022, David Zaslav, the President and CEO of WBD, the studio that owns the movie, confirmed that no Harry Potter or Fantastic Beasts movies were being made.
As a whole, the Harry Potter series is not in the best place. WBD, on the other hand, hopes that the new open-world video game Hogwarts Legacy will do well with critics and fans. If this is a big hit, they might want to make a movie or TV show about it.
Is Fantastic Beasts 4 confirmed?
There are no plans for a Fantastic Beasts 4, and it looks like this series is over. At least, the end of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was pretty neat, and everyone who worked on the movie knew that it might be their last.
This feeling turned out to be right, since there are no plans for Fantastic Beasts 4 or 5, and the story of stopping Grindelwald takes place off-screen.
Why is Fantastic Beasts canceled?
When you look at the movie, it’s clear that there were three main reasons why the franchise was put on hold: controversy, bad reviews, and low ticket sales. When you look at each one separately, the picture becomes much clearer:
First, there’s the trouble, and The Secrets of Dumbledore is right in the middle of it. Fans were upset when WBD fired Johnny Depp as Grindelwald, especially since his defamation trial drew a lot of attention and started just days after the movie came out. This meant that these feelings never had a chance to go away.
J.K. Rowling’s views on sex and gender have caused some fans to disagree with her, and reports and viral videos of troubling behavior from the actor Ezra Miller in the show Credence were rising. Fans didn’t want to see the movie for any of these reasons, and it’s unlikely that they would have felt the same way about any sequels.
The Fantastic Beasts movies have also gotten bad reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes, the first movie got a 74% fresh rating from critics and a 79% rating from audiences. This fell off a cliff with the second part, which got a 36% score from critics and a 54% score from the public. The Secrets of Dumbledore only slightly raised the critics’ score to 46%, but the people who went to see the movie (more on that in a moment) gave it an 83% rating, the highest in the franchise. So if a critic wanted to give a higher score to a different movie, it had to make big changes to how good it was.
But this franchise hasn’t just gotten worse; it’s also lost a lot of money at the box office. The first movie in the series made a good $814 million worldwide, and the second one made an even better $654 million. Still, The Secrets of Dumbledore only made $400.5 at the worldwide box office, which is less than half of what the first movie made. Also, this is from a budget of about $200 million, which doesn’t usually include marketing costs. When all is said and done, the movie may not have made a profit.
This movie’s poor performance at the box office pretty much put an end to any hopes for a fourth movie, especially since the new Zaslav wanted to keep WBD’s finances in good shape. But there is a small chance that there will be a new entry into the Wizarding World at some point because he has said that he is open to making more Harry Potter content.
