Rowling To Pen New Fantasy Movie

8C8959729-130912-ent-fantasticbeasts-vmed_blocks_desktop_smallIt would be a sin to leave money on the table and that’s one sin Warner Bros. will never be accused of when it comes to exploiting the Harry Potter franchise. So the studio has set J.K. Rowling to work writing the screenplay for a new series of movies based on Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a fictitious textbook used at Hogwart’s.

The story will be set in New York 70 years before the beginning of the Harry Potter series, and focus on Newt Scamander, the textbook’s author. It is not a prequel, says Rowling, “but an extension of the wizarding world.”

Rowling said the idea for a “Fantastic Beasts” film had come from Warner Bros., and she soon realized she could not entrust another writer with her creation.

“Having lived for so long in my fictional universe, I feel very protective of it,” she said. “I already knew a lot about Newt.”

“As I considered Warner’s proposal, an idea took shape that I couldn’t dislodge. That is how I ended up pitching my own idea for a film to Warner Bros.”

6 thoughts on “Rowling To Pen New Fantasy Movie

  1. Mr. Charnock:

    If you check the copyright information in the later Harry Potter books, you’ll see that WB purchased not just the right to make adaptations, but ownership of the entire HP universe. So it’s not a matter of whether or not Rowling thinks there should be more spinoffs, just whether WB is going to make them with her cooperation or without it.

  2. While I believe the world could do quite nicely without bestiaries, spell-books, guides to Hogwarts and other spin-offs of the Harry Potter universe, I think quite highly of the novels themselves. While the first was a little too much a simple wish-fulfillment fantasy — Gosh, would it be great one day to discover you had magic powers, a huge pile of cash and that your parents weren’t really yours, just as you always suspected? — the author grew into her subject and learned to avoid such cliches of character and plotting as the series went on. I hardly think it fair to read other SF or fantasy without comment, but sneer at J.K. Rowling just because the Harry Potter books were more popular.

  3. “I hardly think it fair to read other SF or fantasy without comment, but sneer at J. K. Rowling just because the Harry Potter books were more popular.”

    Taral, I so often am distressed by what you write here that I am more than slightly becroggled to find that we are in agreement.

    Mr. Charnock and others of similar thought:

    I think Ms. Rowling does admirable work for others with her wealth, contributing immense amounts to multiple charities, and think about this: her wealth was acquired honestly, from people who willingly paid for what they thought was a good thing in their lives, whose lives were enhanced and enriched by the work of her mind. She is honest and decent, tough-minded enough to see the evil in the world, and brave enough to encourage her readers to fight the good fight along with her.

    She and Diane Duane are a lot alike, by the way, not just because they both write about wizardry.

    Compare that to the investment bankers who gambled with the money which belonged to others, and when they lost it, stole from the taxpayers (many of them the same people whose money they originally lost) the wealth to keep themselves rich, with no care what their actions did to the planetary economy, with what fraud they committed in their “documentation”, who disdain the people whose houses they stole in foreclosure, the people who died of cancer because they could no longer afford medical care, who died of stroke or heart attack from the stress laid upon them, whose children went hungry or were uprooted from their homes and schools.

    Jo Rowling is a good human being, and the investment bankers are Death Eaters. You don’t have to like her fiction, that is a matter of personal taste, but I take great umbridge, no pun intended, with those who think she acquired her wealth in an inappropriate, “rubbish” way.

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