The magic is almost back on the big screen.
The second instalment to J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts film franchise hits theatres on Friday and moves forward the stories of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) and the villainous Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp).
It’s been two years since the first movie in the Harry Potter spinoff series came out, so here’s everything you need to know going into Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.
Where did the last Fantastic Beasts leave off?
The first movie in the series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, introduces Redmayne’s character as a well-intentioned but mistake-prone “magizoologist” who travels around the world making notes about magical creatures for a book he’s writing.
The first film centres on Newt, who is equipped with a briefcase filled with unusual animals, in New York City, where tensions are high in the magic world due to fears about the presence of Gellert Grindelwald, a powerful evil wizard who poses a threat to life as they know it.
More danger ensues when a young orphan named Credence with suppressed magical abilities becomes an Obscurus — a parasite that manifests in those who don’t use their magic — after Percival Graves, a high-ranking member of the wizarding congress, fails to make good on his promise to teach Credence how to use his powers.
Credence takes the form of a dark, shadowy figure and wreaks havoc in New York before he is ultimately defeated, and his fate is left uncertain. The film concludes with Newt using a spell to reveal Grindelwald has used magic to disguise himself as Graves the whole time. Grindelwald is then arrested.
Who exactly is Grindelwald?
Long before Lord Voldemort’s reign of terror, chronicled in the Harry Potter books, the ominous Grindelwald was the most evil figure in the wizarding world.
The white-haired character played by Depp made it his mission for wizards to achieve superiority in a world where those with magical powers and those without them lived in harmony.
“The moment has come to take our rightful place in the world where we wizards are free,” Grindelwald says in the trailer. “Join me, or die.”
The trailer also teases a past connection between Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore, the beloved professor at Hogwarts.
Where does Dumbledore fit into all this?
Jude Law portrays a much younger version of the wise wizard in The Crimes of Grindelwald than the one fans came to adore in the Potter franchise.
Despite his young age in the movie, Dumbledore is still a prominent figure in the magic world, and the trailer shows him saying Newt must be the one to defeat Grindelwald because he personally cannot.
The trailer also briefly shows Dumbledore peering into the Mirror of Erised, which shows someone their heart’s desire, and seeing Grindelwald.
Where does Fantastic Beasts fit in the Harry Potter timeline?
The new film takes place shortly after the first Fantastic Beasts, which is set in the mid-1920s.
That means the event of this new movie occurred roughly 75 years before Harry Potter and his friends attended Hogwarts and battled with Voldemort. – New York Daily News/TNS
MAGICAL: Johnny Depp, left, as Grindelwald and Poppy Corby-Tuech as Rosier in Warner Bros. Pictures’ fantasy adventure Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.
