Eddie Redmayne is the star of the latest Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them image, which sends his wizarding prodigy Newt Scamander on a trip to the Magical Congress of the United States of America.
Fantastic Beasts in tow, Warner Bros.’ anticipated spinoff has been likened to a standalone prequel, rooted in the largely unexplored lore of a wiz-phobic North America during the roaring ’20s.
As a budding magizoologist, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will open at a time when Scamander is fresh from a globe-trotting excursion that had him collecting and analyzing the titular monsters, covering all the legwork that would ensure his book became a permanent fixture of the Hogwarts curriculum decades later.
Headed up by Harry Potter stalwart David Yates, it’s understood that mastermind J.K. Rowling also helped nurture the screenplay for the offshoot during development, as Warner Bros. prepares to embark on a new trilogy in the author’s wizarding world. Speaking to Empire, Yates offered new details about Redmayne’s lead character, and the reason why his case is just so important in the first place.
“Newt is a magizoologist who’s just completed a global journey to find and document magical creatures for a book he plans on writing,” Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts producer David Heyman tells Empire. “His case is important because it contains some of the creatures he’s been researching. It may be small, but there’s a whole world within.”
While it’ll take place in a different timeline altogether, Warner has claimed that Fantastic Beasts will hue closer to Goblet of Fire and its fish-out-of-water dynamic.
With a stellar cast in tow – one which includes Gemma Chan, Carmen Ejogo and Jon Voight, Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller, Colin Farrell and Ron Perlman – Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is poised ti jump-start a new trilogy at Warner Bros. when it arrives in theaters on November 18, 2016.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opens in 1926 as Newt Scamander has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident…were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt’s fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds.
