Fantastic Beasts: Franchise news will shock fans

Fantastic Beasts film series, which is a spin-off of the popular Harry Potter franchise created by J.K. Rowling, is hitting the skids it seems.

The Harry Potter spin-off prequel series Fantastic Beasts has been “parked” by Warner Bros, according to its director David Yates.

“With Beasts, it’s all just parked. We made those three movies, we made the last one through a pandemic, and it was enormous fun but it was tough,” he said to the Inside Total Film podcast.

“We were actually filming when there wasn’t a vaccine. Thank goodness no one got sick, but we did have the most detailed protocols in place.”

Five films?

“The idea that there were going to be five films was a total surprise to most of us,” Yates said.

He added: “Jo just mentioned it spontaneously, at a press screening once. We were presenting some clips of FB1 [Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them]. We’d all signed up for FB1, very enthusiastically. And Jo, bless her, came on … and Jo said, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s five of them.’ And we all looked at each other because no one had told us there were going to be five. We’d sort of committed to this one. So that was the first we’d heard of it.”

Fantastic Beasts

Information about the films:

“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” (2016): This is the first film in the series and is directed by David Yates, who also directed several of the original “Harry Potter” films. The story is set in the wizarding world but takes place in the 1920s, decades before the events of the Harry Potter series. It follows Newt Scamander, a magizoologist, and his adventures in New York City with a case full of magical creatures.

“Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” (2018): This is the second installment in the series, also directed by David Yates. The film delves deeper into the conflict between the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald and the forces of good, including a young Albus Dumbledore. Newt Scamander continues to play a central role in the story.

The Secrets of Dumbledore netted just $407m at the international box office, compared with the first film in the franchise, 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which grossed $814m, and the second movie, 2018’s The Crimes of Grindelwald, which took $654m.

Related: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child film reportedly in development