Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore gets a release date

Deadline reports that we now have a title for the upcoming third Fantastic Beasts movie, which is set in the Harry Potter universe but takes place decades before the story of the Boy Who Lived. The upcoming movie is called…Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.

In these movies, a younger Albus Dumbledore is played by Jude Law, who helps lead character Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) as he tries to head off a wizarding war spearheaded by the evil Gellert Grindelwald.

Now, I dunno about you, but when I heard that title my eyebrow immediately arches in suspicion, because the Harry Potter series has a long and fraught history of engaging with Dumbledore’s…secrets. After Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was published, author J.K. Rowling famously held a press conference where she revealed that Dumbledore was gay. This move was lauded by fans, but there were some who took the position, “Well, that’s great, but why wasn’t he depicted as gay in the actual books? Why did it take a press conference to confirm this?”

But I think most fans were happy with the announcement. Fast forward to the Fantastic Beasts franchise, and things get murkier: now we have a new series of movies written by Rowling that directly touches on the relationship between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, which Rowling has acknowledged was romantic. Now’s the time to actually depict these gay characters as gay, right…?

And then 2018’s The Crimes of Grindelwald came and went without a hint of homosexuality, and it started to seem like Rowling and co were more interested in claiming LGBT+ representation rather than actually…y’know, having some.

And that’s why I look at the title The Secrets of Dumbledore and get suspicious. What secrets are you talking about, Joanne? Cause if you’re dangling the prospect of representation in front of fans again only to reveal the title refers to some hidden mirror or something, it’s gonna feel like trolling.

Harry Potter and the Real-World Baggage

And that’s not the only reason Rowling, who wrote the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts 3 with Steve Kloves, is under fire these days. Last year, the author wrote a lengthy essay where she tried to justify her transphobic beliefs, and the fan community did not react well. She’s pretty quiet since then, and I wonder how much Warner Bros. wants to use her to get the word out on this movie.

And then there’s the matter of Johnny Depp, who played Grindelwald before leaving the role over an entirely different scandal involving his ex-wife Amber Heard. Mads Mikkelsen will play the character in the new movie. Plus there’s the fact that the second movie made substantially less money than the first.

At this point, the Fantastic Beasts series is 30% fantasy story and 70% public relations scandal. Can it recover? Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore will be out in theaters on April 15, 2022, sooner than originally expected — at first it was slated for July 15, 2022. Even though it’s a Warner Bros. movie, Fantastic Beasts 3 will not drop on HBO Max at the same time as it lands in theaters; that deal was for 2021 only.

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