Now that Warner Bros. Discovery has confirmed the news everybody knew was coming, the Harry Potter fandom can officially rebel at knowing the iconic literary series is being rebooted as a TV series planned to run for a decade, less than a dozen years after Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint first bowed out.
However, one of the most overlooked after-effects of the inevitable episodic rehash is that Fantastic Beasts has almost certainly been dragged around the back of the studio’s HQ and put out of its misery. After all, even if we ignore that The Secrets of Dumbledore continued the prequel saga’s alarming downward spiral, what would be the point in continuing to tell stories set in the past of a mythology that’s being given a fresh coat of paint?
Enthusiasm for Newt Scamander’s adventures were running on empty as it was, and the news that Harry Potter is being brought back to the screen in direct opposition to a lot of people’s feelings on the matter has seen Fantastic Beasts being waved goodbye as a viable, relevant, or even worthwhile property.
There’s only so much mileage WB can squeeze out of the Wizarding World, and the fact Fantastic Beasts is being abandoned three chapters into a planned five-film arc underlines that the company knows fine well that only The Boy Who Lived and his associates are capable of recapturing the phenomenon status of the original eight-film franchise.
Do we need 10 years of Harry Potter on the small screen? Absolutely not, but we’re getting it regardless.