Harry Potter: Where the Fantastic Beasts Movies Went Wrong (And How Fast It Happened)

For ten years, Harry Potter’s big screen exploits enraptured moviegoers of all ages. The Boy Who Lived was already a literary icon, who became a prolific silver-screen figure as well. There were endless qualities that endeared the Harry Potter Saga to people; however, one especially enticing quality was its seemingly limitless world – a lore-rich universe people wanted to immerse themselves in, which also mimicked the real-world experience of growing up.

Five years after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part Two closed the book on one corner of the Wizarding World, the Fantastic Beasts saga tried to keep the money rolling in with more wands and fantastical exploits. Suddenly, a limitless world became a lot more confined and repetitive; a saga previously tapping into adolescent experiences now catered exclusively to repeating old pieces of Harry Potter mythos. This trio of Fantastic Beast films was nothing short of a creative boondoggle…and it all went so wrong from the start.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them begins with magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) stepping off a boat into 1926 New York City. Right away, director David Yates instills unease with a dreary vision of the Big Apple in the early 20th century. There’s minimal color in this heavily digitized realm, while Scamander doesn’t register as an immediately compelling character. Meanwhile, the first of those “fantastic beasts” audiences see is a Niffler, a mole-like critter much too cutesy for its own good. Creating fantastical creatures that seem destined for the toy aisle can be a great way to put off audiences – case in point: cutesy Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker droid character “D-O” is gathering dust on toy store shelves to this very day.

These nitpicky visual foibles already get Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them off on the wrong foot. However, the prequel saga capsizes immediately due to a fault that would plague the entire trilogy of films: screenwriter J.K. Rowling suffocating the story with too many characters and subplots. Lots of fictional individuals populated the eight Harry Potter movies, but those narratives always came back to the titular teenage wizard. By contrast, Newt Scamander is overwhelmed by and ultimately lost within an overstuffed ensemble cast that includes witch Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterson), troubled teen Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), and especially superfluous newspaper magnate Henry Shaw Sr. (Jon Voight).

These figures populate an overly busy narrative that never lets a single character leave a discernible impression. There’s so much noise, chaos, and CGI – yet nothing emotionally tangible connects with moviegoers. As Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them clumsily tries intertwining all these disparate lives with various pieces of Wizarding World lore (including the rise of big baddie Grindelwald), the motion picture crumbles. Already, the trilogy was beyond hope of salvaging unless a drastic reboot akin to The Suicide Squad had occurred. After all, this horde of new characters and mythos was clearly being set up to carry five movies worth of adventures, and those Fantastic Beasts sequels were conceptually conceived to expand on, rather than correct, the first film’s missteps.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them also instantly set the Fantastic Beasts trilogy awry with its weirdly wishy-washy commitment to its American setting. For one thing, Scamander was a British character played by the most British actor imaginable. For another, Where to Find Them rarely uses its New York setting in inspired ways. Even with countless landmarks at its disposal, the feature’s backdrops could occupy any city or country. The few ways to inject a distinctly “American” flavor into the film (such as the creation of the term No-Maj) were truly eye-roll-worthy. Also laughably bad are scenes like the sudden introduction of Grindelwald – a reveal that’s borderline incoherent in its execution – which speak to the dismal creative instincts fueling this series.

Subsequent films would carry on the same foibles as The Crimes of Grindelwald and The Secrets of Dumbledore expanded their scope to become globe-trotting adventures. Venturing to domains like Paris, France didn’t suddenly imbue these installments with specific visual identities or deeply precise geographic flourishes. The derivative approach to New York in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them established a horrible precedent later installments couldn’t escape. Even though these prequels explored the Wizarding World beyond Britain, the various new lands lacked distinctive identities or interests.

Meanwhile, the sequel film bizarrely involves our “heroes” trying to stop Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) from preventing the Holocaust – yet the third entry, The Secrets of Dumbledore, doesn’t ever bring up that real-world genocide. Instead, the focus shifts to a quasi-“relevant” storyline about making sure an evil maniac doesn’t rig an election. The Fantastic Beasts movies craved relevancy by depicting brewing fascism and societally accepted intolerance. However, Rowling’s scripts handled this material with such aloofness, filtering those concepts through a deeply privileged cast that made exploring concepts related to persecution an incredibly tone-deaf exercise.

These fatal shortcomings speak to the convoluted storytelling impulses that sank the Fantastic Beasts movies. Whether it was overstuffing the films with too many characters or stumbling through referencing real-world atrocities, the three Fantastic Beasts installments were narrative disasters – and the most glaring issues in the roughly six-hour runtime of this saga were there right from the start.

The criticisms of this Yates directorial effort didn’t inspire course corrections. Sequels could’ve slimmed down the ensemble cast or delivered more streamlined narratives. Instead, The Crimes of Grindelwald and The Secrets of Dumbledore just came up with new flaws. This included a cringe-inducing over-reliance on retreading familiar Harry Potter landmarks, like Hogwarts, after Where to Find Them’s artistic stagnation became creative quicksand the franchise could never fully escape.

Then there was franchise lead Eddie Redmayne’s performance. Right from the start, Redmayne exudes a quasi-Hugh Grant energy, stumbling over sentences and failing to make eye contact with anyone, evoking that famous British performer. But Redmayne never made Scamander work as a standalone protagonist, instead, he was a hodgepodge of pop culture’s past, not something exciting in the present. It became harder and harder to stay invested in him as the series went on – there was just little in the way of relatable humanity to Scamander. Rowling’s writing further isolated audiences from the character, making the face of the entire Fantastic Beasts enterprise a bore – a flaw the trilogy could never overcome. Not even The Secrets of Dumbledore shifting a lot of the focus over to Jude Law’s younger Albus Dumbledore could fix this problem: Scamander was still a principal player in that third installment, no matter how much screentime Law had. Redmayne’s Scamander performance wasn’t working the moment Where to Find Them began. It wouldn’t get any better over two more movies.

The Fantastic Beasts trilogy is one of modern cinema’s most egregious creative misfires. Wizarding World fans obsess over every detail of any media even tangentially connected to Harry Potter. Yet these features (which cost a reported combined $600 million to make) have vanished from the cultural consciousness with shocking speed. Warner Bros. is even reversing course and embracing a TV show reboot of the original Harry Potter stories, ensuring that the Fantastic Beasts trilogy is destined to become a pop culture footnote. That might sound like an impossible outcome for something extending out from one of the most beloved fantasy sagas ever; however, the flaws that weighed down Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them torpedoed the entire trilogy like a wizard’s curse.

You can stream Fantastic Beasts movies on Max. If you want to.