For Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Rowling’s first screenwriting endeavor, she tried replicating a trick she had pulled off in the book that started it all, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. That’s ironic, considering Rowling herself wrote the screenplays for the Fantastic Beasts films-something she never did for the Harry Potter adaptations.

Rowling and the curse of the prequel series Fantastic Beasts has tried to capitalize on that massive built-in fan base, but the movies neglect the original franchise’s most spellbinding features: substantial storytelling with heaps of enduring charm. The series, across three installments, has never understood the audience it was trying to serve-the millions of readers and viewers who helped make Harry Potter the best-selling book series in history, turn the films’ young cast into household names, and conjure a market for a successful Broadway play. Yet the biggest reason for Fantastic Beasts’ decline is not the pandemic or the tarnished public image of the talent involved. Rowling’s polarizing comments about the trans community, multiple cast members’ scandals, and the pandemic’s impact on the viability of theatrical releases-all of which likely contributed to an awkward press tour and rumors about an early end to a planned five-film arc. Off-screen, the franchise has been plagued with trouble, including the author J. Over the weekend, Secrets, which reportedly cost $200 million to make, drew $43 million at the domestic box office, the softest opening ever for a release from the Wizarding World.

The Fantastic Beasts films, a prequel series that once seemed like a foolproof moneymaker to extend the Harry Potter franchise, have become an expensive exercise in diminishing returns instead. Or maybe, given how the clash arrived around the two-hour mark, they were simply too exhausted by the film to process what the moment meant. Maybe they found the look of the action-all CGI whizbangs against a colorless backdrop-silly.

Maybe they were thrown off by the rushed lead-up to the scene, which had, a beat earlier, involved an election for the next leader of a magical society. But when the two began firing flashy spells from their wands, the audience at my showing-nowhere near sold out, on a Saturday evening-laughed. Albus Dumbledore, the mighty wizard played by Jude Law, comes face-to-face with his former lover turned nemesis, Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen), breaking the pact they’d made as young men never to fight each other. The final showdown in Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is supposed to be epic. This article contains spoilers for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.

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