Take a second and reflect: How wild is it that there’s a movie in theaters right now whose basic premise is “Jude Law and Mads Mikkelson are exes waging a clandestine magical war to work out the baggage of their relationship,” and yet somehow, no one actually seems to give a shit?
Such is the plight of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore, the latest, most-cursed-yet installment of J.K. Rowling’s increasingly cursed Harry Potter franchise, which is now on track to post the lowest box office numbers of the entire Wizarding World series of movies. Per Variety, the film is set to bring in roughly $40 million this weekend, $22 million less than 2018's The Crimes Of Grindelwald—a “blockbuster” so fundamentally incoherent that reading a plot synopsis of it now (despite your humble Newswire writer having actually been dragged to see the damn thing in theaters back in the day) feels like stumbling into the manifesto of a flashback-obsessed psychopath.
And, yes, admittedly: Pandemic. But continued COVID-anxieties can’t totally explain away why a film ostensibly based on the most popular kids’ lit series of the last 20 years can’t beat a movie about Woody Harrelson playing an extraterrestrial serial killer goo monster at the box office. For that, you have to turn to all the other factors, both internal and external, that are set to bury this film: J.K. Rowling’s endlessly reiterated transphobia; the franchise’s weird will-they/won’t-they/he’s-Mads-Mikkelson-now relationship with Johnny Depp; Rowling’s weaknesses as a first-, second-, and third-time screenwriter, and, of course, Rowling’s endlessly reiterated transphobia. (And if you think we’re harping on J.K. Rowling’s views on trans people here, you should get a load of the social media accounts of one J.K. Rowling.)
All of this, despite the fact that Secrets has actually done a decent bit better than Crimes, critically—maybe because we’re all just mad for Mads, or maybe because Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves returned to the franchise to add a little coherency to the films’ plotting.
The question, then, is where Warner Bros. goes from here with its very expensive, suddenly very dry cash cow. Variety notes that the studio has not, as of yet, greenlit either a fourth or fifth Beasts film, despite past assertions that this epic story about a man who has a lot of fancy magical dogs could only really function as a pentalogy. Rumors are that the series is now in “wait and see” mode. And—barring an unlikely rally from the international community, which has normally been pretty hot on these movies, but which now has its own box-office-affecting problems (institutional homophobia in China and the war in Ukraine foremost among them)—it doesn’t sound like Secrets is going to make a compelling financial case for itself, or Beasts as a whole.