Fantastic Beasts: The magic formula behind JK Rowling’s Harry Potter universe

The Crimes of Grindelwald is out tomorrow but you probably didn’t need to be told that, did you? You can’t get away from the film, the second in J K Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts series.

Eddie Redmayne is everywhere you look (which is fine by me) as Newt Scamander, the magizoologist with a quiff; the images are on every bus stop; the merchandise is in your nearest Lego store; and it may be that Eddie R does for long overcoats and bow ties what England manager Gareth Southgate did for waistcoats this summer.

It is, in short, ubiquitous. No matter what the critics say — and this paper’s review by Matthew Norman is out tomorrow — it’s going to gross hefty sums … an estimated $65-$75 million in the US alone in the first weekend.

The thing about this series is that it shows Rowling’s global reach exceeds that of Grindelwald — in a non-fascist way, obviously; Johnny Depp’s character is the Hitler of the wizarding world and you can tell he’s a bad ’un because one of his eyes is weirdly discoloured.

This film takes us to Paris (very fetching in the 1920s, and the French Ministry of Magic has Art Nouveau cages) via London, with a brief detour to dear old Hogwarts. The first film of the series was set in New York and indeed the latest one kicks off there, as Grindelwald escapes from captivity in style (that’s not a spoiler because if he didn’t escape there wouldn’t be this sequel, would there?) in a chariot drawn by … dragons.

In other words, with the Fantastic Beasts series, the Wizarding World — the comprehensive title for these films plus the original Harry Potters and presumably any future ones — has been liberated from Hogwarts and from Britain to roam pretty well anywhere in time and space.

The Harry Potter books and films were essentially a boarding-school story with all the discipline in terms of place and time (school terms and school holidays) that this implied. There were a finite number of school years. Now there are simply no constraints.

This series is essentially a prequel and it features an earlier episode in the career of Albus Dumbledore — played here as a young man rather fabulously by Jude Law — in which he gets to grips with his old blood brother, Grindelwald.

So there is a familiar aspect to the plot. But the characters in this series are different. Johnny Depp is the Voldemort of his day, with the same tiresome fixation on pure wizarding blood, except this time the project is more political. The rise of Grindelwald, with his sinister pallor and Nuremberg-style rallies, recalls a very different You Know Who.

The Fantastic Beasts series is set in the 1920s; the next could perfectly easily go farther back, to the 16th century, perhaps, to investigate the youth of the alchemist Nicholas Flamel (who features unexpectedly in this one) or forward, or over to China. But the genius of Fantastic Beasts is that it starts in New York — the first film gave us an entire American magical infrastructure, complete with its own school and bureaucracy, Macusa (Magical Congress of the USA). And I’m not giving anything away in saying that the primary love interest here is Eddie R plus Katherine Waterston, that is to say Newt Scamander plus Tina Goldstein — an Anglo-American Special Relationship. What he really likes about her, by the way, is that her eyes look just like a salamander’s. Awww.

And there is indeed a Chinese, or at least, Asian, element: Credence Barebones, the boy suppressed in the first film by his Puritan adoptive mother, is in Paris too with a travelling circus looking for his real family. He’s got a crush on an Asian girl whose party trick is to turn into a snake, Nagini — that isn’t going to end well. Plus the most spectacular beast in the film is a Chinese dragon-cat, Zouwu.

You may as well get stuck into the plot — and personally I was grateful to go to the film with my 11-year-old daughter to explain it to me — because we haven’t heard the last of it. Back in 2014, Warner Bros said the Fantastic Beasts series would be “at least” a trilogy. Two years later, Rowling intimated that there would be five films. So it’s not quite Harry Potter in scale yet, but not far off. By the end of it Redmayne will have pushed Daniel Radcliffe into oblivion and we’ll all have forgotten about Emma Watson, at least as Hermione.

The plot is, I may say, big on family relationships as well as magi-fascism. But it’s not aimed directly at the younger children who flocked to the early Harry Potter films; it’s rated 12A (interestingly, the Lego merchandise is aimed at children aged seven or over).

Fantastic Beasts is directed by David Yates, who has let it be known that Rowling has ideas for the next film after this one. Talking to Entertainment Weekly about The Crimes of Grindelwald, he declares, “The movie takes the story in a whole new direction — as you should. You don’t want to repeat yourself. The second movie introduces new characters as she builds this part of the Harry Potter universe further. It’s a very interesting development from where we start out. The work is pouring out of her.”

So where might the next film go? To Berlin, presumably, given that what we’ve got here is a wizarding allegory of the rise of Hitler. Or Austria.

Meanwhile, during filming Depp generated some altogether unwelcome publicity of his own by virtue of his vituperative split from his former wife — he declared that he regretted the embarrassment this caused Rowling, who has, however, stood by him throughout. But in a way, the publicity is all good; he’s meant to be the anti-hero, after all.

The amount of money this new series will generate may well overtake the $814 million made by the first Fantastic Beasts film — not bad for a title that started life as a little paperback costing a fiver for Comic Relief. Last year, there was a mild fuss when Forbes magazine dropped Rowling from its list of global billionaires; the Crimes of Grindelwald should put her back on it.

It’s not as if it’s just the films that generate funds: the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, for which she wrote the script, transferred to Broadway and is still going strong. This is a woman who can get her fans to purchase the text of an actual stage play. Certainly the merchandising side of Fantastic Beasts looks promising. You can buy a dear little plush Niffler for £35; a travelling trunk, minus the Kelpie, is £125.

There are dangers, of course, for the brand as it becomes more global, less cohesive, more convoluted. As The Atlantic magazine observed, Rowling is now close to entering George Lucas territory, that is, when the Star Wars creator turned his efforts to prequels and explainers.

Whatever. The Wizarding World phenomenon is now unstoppable. Rowling is the Pied Piper of our day and where she goes, we follow. And she’s only 53.