Warner Bros. put a franchise-freezing spell on Fantastic Beasts

“With Beasts for a minute, it’s all just parked,” Yates told the Inside Total Film podcast (via The Hollywood Reporter). “We got to the end of [2022’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore], and we’re all so proud of that movie, and when it went out into the world, we just needed to sort of stop and pause and take it easy.”

The news must’ve been difficult for Yates, who is promoting his new Netflix pharma satire Pain Hustlers and has directed seven Wizard Worlds movies thus far. However, it sounds like he even could use a break from J.K. Rowling, who we imagine is just as lovely in real life as she is on Twitter. Just kidding, in 2016, she went off script and “just mentioned” a gargantuan five-film Fantastic Beasts series. It was a “total surprise” to Yates.

“[J.K Rowling] just mentioned it spontaneously, at a press screening once,” he said. “We were presenting some clips of FB1. We’d all signed up for FB1, very enthusiastically. And Jo, bless her, came on and said, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s five of them.’ We all looked at each other—because no one had told us there were going to be five. We’d committed to this one. So that was the first we’d heard of it.”

It’s all a cold splash of water for Yates, who has made quite a career out of directing thespians holding sticks. Never fear—there’s a Harry Potter TV series coming to Max that he’d be perfect for.