Fantastic Beasts, Rogue One try to carve out their franchise places
The new Harry Potter and Star Wars movies face daunting tasks: satisfying audience expectations and matching huge box-office receipts while presenting new characters and plots that diverge from what the fans are used to
Here’s a Hollywood twist: The next two months will bring a Harry Potter movie without Harry Potter and a Star Wars film sans Jedi.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story add to two of the biggest entertainment franchises without actually being direct sequels. The positives are obvious with the A-list branding, but there are some negatives. Among the challenges: matching the huge box-office takes of past movies; and differentiating the films while also still connecting to audiences.
“It’s a problem that every studio would actually like to have,” says Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations.
“This is a way to monopolise the marketplace without putting a burden on making those actual sequels and riding everything on them. It gives them a little wiggle room to have new adventures, to try something daring.”
Taking place 65 years before Harry, Hermione and Ron go to Hogwarts, Fantastic Beasts – the start of a recently announced five-movie series – centres on magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and his adventures collecting escaped creatures on the loose in New York. And in the first of the galactic “anthology” slate, Rogue One revisits a storied past as well, showcasing Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) and a Rebel spy mission to steal the plans for the Empire’s Death Star in a tale set before the events of 1977’s first Star Wars film.