After two delightful days of Beatrice Groves guest posts about the soon to be released Secrets of Dumbledore, the third installment in the long delayed Fantastic Beasts film franchise, I realized I really have tuned out the klaxon promotional noise coming out of Hollywood and movie mavens online about what’s coming up. I plead “Indifference” sad as I am that Rowling’s original screenplay set in Brazil was trashed and that this film, written by Steve Kloves with contributions by The Presence, and produced and directed by David Yates and David Heyman, may consequently be more coherent (less butchered) than Beasts 2, Crimes of Grindelwald — and a much less mythic and meaningful story as the original would have been.
Professor Groves’ notes encourage me, however. I retain the secret hope that it was Rowling who insisted on the rewrite and that this much anticipated film takes the ensemble production to new and great heights. In that spirit, I offer three videos by an Uber-Fan who has been tracking and dissecting the Secrets trailers for months now. I hope that you will find them, as I did, great catch-up vehicles for the ideas prevalent in Beasts fandom — Queenie under the Imperius Curse! — in the weeks before the global gradual release. Enjoy!
Where did they say the original screenplay was trashed?
See 1:40 in the first of the three videos above.
I heard that the third FB movie is not set in Brazil because the Covid pandemia hit Brazil very hard, and filming in Brazil has been deemed too complicated and risky. Therefore the script needed major course corrections, and Steve Cloves helped JKR to fashion a new sript.
This explanation sounds plausible, since it is true that Brazil was hit especially hard by the first Covid waves, and it did not help that some highly placed politicians denied that the virus was a serious threat.
The movie opens today here in Germany – and the first reviews are very encouraging.
I hope that JKR and Steve Cloves managed to retain the main ideas and themes of the orginal script. But I really do not think that JKR would have agreed to surrender major overarching plot points. And since JKR herself decided not to write a new series of novels – which I would have loved to read – but to tell her FB story in the course of five blockbuster movies, it may be a good thing that a veteran script writer was prominently involved this time around.