Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them proved to be a welcome and successful return to the wizarding world of J.K. Rowling’s creation. To date, the movie has pulled in over $812 million at the box office, and recently became the first movie within the Harry Potter universe to win an Oscar. It’s fair to say the future looks bright for the four remaining movies in the franchise, too, since audiences really warmed to the characters of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston), her sister Queenie (Allison Sudol), and No-Maj Jacob (Dan Fogler).
Fantastic Beasts 2 is set to arrive in 2018, and though Newt Scamander will feature, the movie looks set to focus much more heavily on the rise of the dark wizard, Gridelwald (Johnny Depp), and in particular his relationship with a young Dumbledore (yet to be cast). Following on from news that Fantastic Beasts 2 would start filming this summer, and according to My Entertainment World (via Heroic Hollywood) it now looks certain that it will start shooting this August in Paris and the U.K..
New York is not listed as a filming location this time around. Though it was already known that Fantastic Beasts 2 would be set mainly in Europe, since that was where Grindelwald conducted his reign of terror, it wasn’t known if New York and in particular, MACUSA, would feature at all. That means, then, that somehow Jacob, Queenie and Tina find themselves in Europe; not much of a stretch for Tina since we know she goes onto marry Newt, but it’ll be interesting to see how or if Queenie and Jacob end up there (let’s hope so).
It also paves the way for Credence Barebone to have an interesting journey of some kind, since director David Yates has confirmed that when the obscurus was obliterated, bits of it remained, meaning Credence can return. There was also a scene cut from the ending of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which showed Credence leaving New York on a boat. Given his eerie infatuation with Percival Graves, who turned out to be Grindelwald, and the fact that Grindelwald knows Credence is an obscurus, it seems like only a matter of time before the pair meet again.
Elsewhere, Zoe Kravitz has confirmed that she will also have a bigger arc in the subsequent Fantastic Beasts movies, as Leta Lestrange. Teasing her “complex relationship” with Newt Scamander, Kravitz hinted at having a much larger role than just appearing as a moving photograph. It could well be that her relationship with Newt, and in turn, his relationship with Dumbledore, will all tie in together, as Dumbledore tries to stop Grindelwald’s rise to power.
Source: Screenrant