#75 Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

Note: This review was written and scheduled prior to JK Rowling endorsing transphobia on twitter. I think this is pretty scummy but this is a negative review of her work anyway so... This was written prior to revelations that the allegations against Johnny Depp were revealed to be falsified, whilst I only barely touch upon the subject, it seems they made the correct decision keeping him on. 

I love the Harry Potter films and I was pleasantly surprised by the first Fantastic Beasts film. The same cannot be said for its sequel

It was difficult to remain excited with as the build-up came around. The accusations around Johnny Depp and their defence of him, even giving him a much larger role this time around, the uncomfortableness around their decisions with Nagini (more on that later). With the inclusion of Dumbledore this time around, hearing that his sexuality wouldn’t be addressed was kinda disappointing too. (We will get to specifics in the review portion)

JK Rowling is writing the script, like she did with the first one, JK is a talented writer, the 7 Harry Potter Books are some of the best stories I've ever read, but there are differences between writing a book and a film, and I suspect JK Rowling’s talents are more in the book department. After the success of the first Fantastic Beasts, it was announced this would be a 5-movie series, this is important for a lot of reasons we’ll get into.

The end result is the worst ranked Harry Potter movie to date with a 37% Rotten Tomatoes Rating (avg 5.8/10) and a 55% audience score (3.32/5) and that shows with their box office, whilst it didn’t flop, making $653m on its $200m budget, that pales in comparison to the $814m its predecessor made and led to the studio upping the turnaround times from 2 to 3 years. So, what happened? Let’s take a look.

Harry Potter Month - Mini Review: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Chris Columbus steps down as director and there are some significant changes in style as a result, most of which stick throughout the remaining films. Obviously the death of Richard Harris resulted in a recast for Dumbledore. Sir Michael Gambon took the role.

It was produced with a $130m budget and made $796.7m at the box office, which, whilst still successful, is the least of any Harry Potter movie. I’ll suggest a possible reason for the boost when I do the review for the next film, but let’s take a look at this one first.

Harry Potter Month - Mini Review: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

It’s Harry Potter Month. 

Where I do mini reviews of all but one of the Harry Potter because like hell am I doing long reviews of movies that are within the realms of 2 and a half hours long. In fact, I’m only really doing a long review of half a movie… OK, I’m going off a bit here but let’s just say that the Harry Potter films do question the myth that children have short attention spans.

So where better to start than the first movie: Harry Potter and the Philsopher’s (or if you’re in America Sorcerer’s because... I really don’t care, the books were written by J K Rowling in England, it’s Philosopher’s) Stone.

Released in 2001 the movie was given a $125m budget and naturally was a success, grossing $987m in the box office, the second highest of any of the Harry Potter movies.

Just a final note before I begin, I haven’t reread the books for the purposes of these reviews, I’m judging the film on its own merits, not as an adaptation (although for some intent, I will reference areas of the book that I remember)