Fantastic Beasts The Secrets of Dumbledore featurette: Dumbledore assembles his ‘First Army’

From this movie onwards, Mads Mikkelsen will play the role of Grindelwald, replacing Johnny Depp who was fired after he lost his libel case against a UK tabloid that had referred to him as a wife-beater.

Fantastic Beasts is a part of the Wizarding World, the fictional universe that also includes Harry Potter films, books, and other media. It is the prequel series and mainly follows Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander, a magizoologist, and a young (well, younger) Dumbledore essayed by Jude Law, the headmaster of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series.

The featurette has snippets of interviews featuring Redmayne, Law, Jessica Williams (who portrays Professor Eulalie Hicks, a teacher at American wizardly school called Ilvermorny), director David Yates, and producer, David Heyman, the last two of whom are veterans of the franchise.

The second Fantastic Beasts movie, The Crimes of Grindelwald, was a critical and commercial failure. It scored 37 per cent at review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. At 653.8 million dollar total worldwide gross, it is the lowest grossing Wizarding World film to date.

Overall, despite the poor reception to the second Fantastic Beasts film, The Secrets of Dumbledore appears to be a step in the right direction. The makers promise thrills, humour and, in Redmayne’s words, “pure spectacle”.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore arrives in the UK on April 8 and in the US on April 15.