Fantastic Beasts 3 gets official title, to release on this date

It is the prequel series and follows Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander, a magizoologist, and a young Albus Dumbledore, as they take on latter’s former friend and now foe Gellert Grindelwald, the Dark Lord before Voldemort’s rise.

David Yates, a franchise veteran who helmed the last four Harry Potter films and previous two Fantastic Beasts movies, returns to direct the third movie. JK Rowling, the franchise creator, is co-writing the script with Steve Kloves.

In The Secrets of Dumbledore, Jude Law plays the role of young Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series, who was then the school’s professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts. The movie also stars Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Zoë Kravitz, Callum Turner, Claudia Kim, William Nadylam, and Kevin Guthrie.

The role of Grindelwald was earlier played by Johnny Depp, but after the actor lost his libel case against UK newspaper The Sun, which had called him a ‘wife-beater’, Warner Bros removed Depp from the role. Mads Mikkelsen will replace him in the last three movies.

Earlier this year, Mikkelsen told Collider, “Nobody’s interested in me going in there and trying to copy anything, that would be creative suicide immediately, especially when it’s been done before and masterfully.”