wizarding world | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On How “Fantastic Beasts” Fails to Capture the Magic of “Harry Potter”…

Posted on April 1, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the upcoming release of Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at one of the more inert major franchises of the past decade or so.

The success of the Harry Potter movies made the extension of the franchise inevitable; and the intellectual property has expanded into theme parks and stage shows. However, the attempts to expand the world into feature films has met with frustrating results. So far, the Fantastic Beasts franchise has felt a little lifeless and inert, a blockbuster franchise driven by exposition and apocalyptic spectacle, rather than allowing the audience to really immerse themselves in the world as they did with the earlier stories.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: brand extension, fantastic beasts, franchise, harry potter, intellectual property, JK Rowling, wizarding world, wizards | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Fantastic Beasts – The Crimes of Grindelwald

Posted on November 13, 2018 by Darren

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald knows its audience.

The Crimes of Grindelwald is a film consciously aimed at the audience member who has charted and navigated the family trees of the Harry Potter franchise, who knows the finer details of families that were never explicitly featured in the original series and who can recognise names that were never spoken aloud. This is a film that is geared towards the kinds of fans who devour supporting material, who pour enthusiastically and endlessly over the appendices to The Lord of the Rings.

Law student.

This is not to mock or belittle those sorts of fans. Indeed, there is something infectious and exciting in that enthusiasm, in standing outside a cinema and hear enthusiastic six-year-olds with a much better grasp of the dynamics at play than the adults who accompanied them. The eagerness with which these fans pour over the finer details is genuinely heartening, and some of it might even be absorbed by osmosis as they boast about “when” they “got” some twist or other. This a movie aimed at those who devour scenes of exposition and love a good flashback or six.

The only issue is that The Crimes of Grindelwald has precious little for the more casual audience member, whether the casual cinema-goer who just wants a night full of wizards and witches or the more relaxed fan who has only watched the films or read the books once a few years ago. For those audience members, The Crimes of Grindelwald does not offer nearly enough. Or it offers too much.