#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 Deathly Hallows part 1

We’re coming down to the end now as we have the penultimate entry to Harry Potter Month and the last of the mini reviews. I suppose before we start I should make my opinions clear on the subject of splitting stories over multiple movies. I think for this film it was necessary. Unlike previous books, where it was easy to cut things out, this book was fairly linear in its structure, that meaning that most if not all of the story was focused on a single plot-line rather than having sub-plots that could be cut out of a movie. I however don’t see necessity of it for every novel adaptation. I have not read or watched the Hobbit but I struggle to believe a 300 page novel needs 3 movies to tell the entire story. As for the latest superhero movies that are up to this, I’ll reserve my judgement until I’ve seen them.

But back to the movie itself, this and part 2 were given a joint budget (they were shot back to back) of $250m, the movie went onto make $960.3m at the box office, the second highest of any Harry Potter movie. It was reasonably well accepted critically earning 78% rotten tomatoes and 65 on metacritic. But let’s dive in