The Fantastic Beasts movies won't continue, give or take a Newt Scamander cameo on a theme park ride

The year was 2016. The Harry Potter movie series was five years gone, but people wanted more. Warner Bros. launched a new series of Harry Potter movies: Fantastic Beasts, a prequel series that would follow magizoologist (it means he likes magical animals) Newt Scamander, played by Eddie Redmayne. Also present were younger versions of Albus Dumbledore and his one-time nemesis Gellert Grindelwald, who kind of took the spotlight away from Newt and friends as the series went on.

All the Fantastic Beasts movies did pretty well at the box office, although each one made around $200 million less than the last, and critical reception was mixed. Maybe the studio saw that trend and decided to pull the plug while the pulling was good, reducing the number of planned movies from five to three. Also, Grindelwald was recast between movies two and three, with Mads Mikkelsen stepping in for Johnny Depp. Also also, screenwriter J.K. Rowling really started to lean into her anti-trans mania towards the latter end of the series. There was a lot of drama behind the scenes, perhaps more than was worth it.

So we didn't really need to be told that the Fantastic Beasts series was over — the writing was on the wall for this one — but Eddie Redmayne is here to put the nail in the coffin for anybody who does. “I think they probably have [seen the last of Newt],” Redmayne told ComicBook.com. “That was a very frank answer, but yeah. And that’s as far as I know. I mean, you’d have to speak to the people at Warner Bros. and J.K Rowling, but as far as I know, that’s it."

If you're a really big Fantastic Beasts stan, there is one tiny silver lining: "I think he may come back in a glimpse in the Universal world in Florida that they’re opening up, in which you may catch a glimpse of what he was up to in Paris,” Redmayne concluded. So if you want to see the next chapter in Newt's story, you can always fly to Florida.

Not to beat a dead hippogriff, but if you want even more proof that the Fantastic Beasts series is dead and buried, you can look at what Warner Bros. Discovery is currently doing with the Harry Potter IP: they're making a whole new TV show that will adapt Rowling's books afresh, with new actors playing the likes of Harry, Ron and Hermione. ComicBook.com calls that a "head-scratching decision," which I find head-scratching. The original Harry Potter story is still really popular, the spinoff didn't work, so they're going back to the source in the hopes that lots of people will watch and they'll make money. And they probably will. Seems pretty cut and dried to me.

The Harry Potter show will be along on HBO and Max sometime in the next few years. Meanwhile, Redmayne's new drama Day of the Jackel drops on Peacock on November 14.

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