In July 2011, it ended. Adapting the final novel in rags-to-riches author J. K. Rowling’s generation-defining series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 marked the eighth and final film at the core of the Wizarding World. For a full decade, fans aged alongside Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson, starring as the heroic trio in the once-in-a-century, intergenerational, right-time-and-place story; a world that captivated Millennials, then grew up with them; a pop culture phenomenon to rival Star Wars; and now, it was over.
Sure, the $8 billion box office revenue of the Potter films are really just a portion of the “Wizarding World” franchise’s $33 billion in earnings since The Philosopher’s Stone‘s publication in 1997 (with the remaining billions due to books, merchandise, video games, home video, and of course, theme parks)… but undeniably, the end of Harry Potter would signal the end of the Wizarding World’s annual billion dollar box office dominance.
… Or would it? In 2013, J. K. Rowling and Warner Bros. announced that they’d begun pre-production on a new film that would serve not just as a new chapter, but a new story altogether in the Wizarding World franchise, set decades before and far from the events of Harry Potter. You have to remember that when Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them was announced, fans knew only that it would follow the exploits of explorer and “magi-zoologist” Newt Scamander on his international adventures that would eventually lead him to write the textbook of the same name that would one day end up on Hogwarts school supply lists – a subtle but spectacular connection to existing Potter lore.
Set in the 1920s and ’30s, images were conjured in fans’ minds of the Wizarding World’s Indiana Jones; an explorer and adventurer, braving ancient temples and magical jungles in search of the rarest, wildest, and most dangerous of the Wizarding World’s creatures; a fun, colorful, adventurous, pulpy, and low-stakes exploration of a corner of the Wizarding World we’d never seen. It stood to reason that the globetrotting exploits of Scamander and his research into fantastic creatures could even become a standalone franchise in its own right – a potential made all the more real when it was announced in 2014 that Fantastic Beasts was pre-approved for three films (revised in 2016 to FIVE films) set in – but exploring a vastly different corner from – Harry Potter’s world.
Sounds fun, right? Then, the troubles began.
Fantastic Beasts…
Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them made its debut in 2016. To be sure, the film earned positive reviews and earned a high-respectable $800 million. But at least for many, it wasn’t really what they’d expected.
For better or worse, the Fantastic Beasts series follows Newt Scamander – not a rugged, Oscar Isaacs, Indiana Jones-esque explorer, but a timid, buttoned-up, and introverted worker for the Ministry of Magic played by the soft-spoken Eddie Redmayne. His adventures begin not in exotic jungles, but in New York City of 1926, where an enchanted suitcase of irridescent, unusual, CGI, Rowling-invented creatures (a divergence from the classic unicorns, dragons, mermaids, centaurs, and spiders of the Harry Potter world) accidentally, anti-climactically opens.
Scamander allies with Tina Goldstein (a former Auror caught in the bureaucracy of the Magical Congress of the United States, or MACUSA) as well as a “No-Maj” (apparently, the American equivalent to the British “Muggle”) New Yorker named Jacob Kowalski. From there… well… let’s ask: do you remember the plot of Magical Creatures and Where To Find Them?
We’ll give you a hint: it involves an anti-witchcraft legion of puritans who live in a ramshackle old schoolhouse weirdly set in the middle of Manhattan, whose adopted child Credence (Ezra Miller, in the actor’s second high-profile Warner Bros. franchise after playing DC’s The Flash) has so much repressed magical potential, it turns into a violent force called an Obscurus. MACUSA weirdly sentences Newt and Tina to death because a creature killed a senator, but they escape. Also, there’s a detective played by Collin Farrel who’s actually using a Polyjuice Potion (hey, I remember those!) to disguise that he’s not Collin Farrel, he’s Johnny Depp, playing the “Voldemort” of early 20th-century Wizarding World, Gellart Grindelwald, who was remembered as a long-dead bad guy and one-time Dumbledore foe by Harry Potter’s time.
Look, Fantastic Beasts didn’t have an easy job to begin with in expanding the Wizarding World. It’s okay that the movie was (as reviews put it) “bogged down by exposition” or a bit of a “slog,” having to introduce so much new world-building.
And even if viewers can get the strict sense that Rowling doesn’t know much about New York, American government, or America’s home-grown concepts of magic and magical creatures, a New York City of the 1920s is a clever, intriguing setting no one would’ve expected from the Wizarding World’s next era. Sure, Fantastic Beasts is a little color-drained, and pretty CGI-heavy, and a little too in-the-weeds with world-building. But even if it isn’t the general aesthetic so many fans pictured, it would be interesting to see how Scamander ends up writing that text book, and with two – er, I mean, FOUR – more movies to go, that was inevitable.
Then, it started to crumble… Read on..
… and How To Lose Them
Admittedly, though many people enjoyed Fantastic Beasts, it’s probably fair to say that there was an AVATAR-ness around it… The film never quite picked up that “water cooler” buzz, and if we hadn’t told you that the film’s “Ron and Hermione” equivalent were named Jacob and Tina, would you have remembered? Yes, like James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, Fantastic Beasts just didn’t seem to leave many footprints in pop culture; no memorable characters, quotes or even iconic creatures; no “theme park-able” settings, snacks, or souvenirs…
It was a fine movie… and like Avatar, the idea of four more of them felt kind of like something no one asked for. Of course, unlike Avatar, the second entry didn’t prove the naysayers wrong.
2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald picked up a year later, shifting the setting to 1920s Paris – a visually stunning place and time, for sure. But The Crimes of Grindelwald was, frankly, the Wizarding World’s first flop. The film earned just $650 million (the lowest gross by far of the Wizarding World), representing a precipitous 20% drop from the first – a very, very bad omen. To make matters worse, Fantastic Beasts 2 topped out at a scathing 36% on Rotten Tomatoes, with just 69% of audiences saying they’d recommend it.
The primary complaint: J. K. Rowling herself. In most book-to-film adaptations (including all eight Harry Potter films), a screenwriter is brought into the production to turn something written into “movie” format. A screenwriter’s job is to make necessary edits, re-arrangings, and adjustments that make a literary work filmable, cutting characters or extraneous scenes – even to the distaste of fans. It’s the work that’s necessary to condense a 500-page novel that takes weeks to read into a movie that takes two hours to watch.
Writing a story and writing a movie are two very different skills. As she had in the first film, Rowling wrote Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald alone. But with the growing complexity, cast, and world-building required of a second entry, the story clearly got away from her. It’s no wonder that the film was criticized for its pacing; for its ridiculously huge cast (seriously – look at the movie poster below and try to name even half of the characters); and most damningly, for being (according to Variety) “a cluttered expansion of the Harry Potter franchise” where “rarely is there much tension, or sense of adventure, or any real longing…” Deemed “charmless” and weighed down by a “grindingly complicated” plot, The Crimes of Grindelwald was just… not much fun to watch.
Like George Lucas’ Star Wars prequel trilogy, Rowling’s Harry Potter prequels ended up being a “slog” defined by tiresome politics, forgettable locales, an almost hilariously-huge cast of well-acted but largely-forgettable characters, and buckets of backstory baggage invented to flesh out a world that we already innately understood, and answer questions that no one was asking. About the only thing the film didn’t have was fantastic beasts!
But to our thinking, the film’s issue ran even deeper. Variety’s Andrew Barker famously suggested that film felt like “watching one chess piece after another being moved into position.” That’s frustrating, because in Fantastic Beasts, fans were promised – and genuinely hoped for! – a legitimately new corner of the Wizarding World. After all, surely something of significance has happened in the history of Wizardom that doesn’t ultimately end up connecting to Harry Potter! Certainly, there can be a low-stakes story set in the Wizarding World upon which the fate of all Wizards do not rest! We have to be believe that there can be a fun, adventurous pulpy genre pic set in the Wizarding World that doesn’t ultimately take us back to Hogwarts.
But by the end of The Crimes of Grindelwald, not only had Grindelwald been set-up as the “big bad” of the three – no, five! – film arc, but a young Albus Dumbledore (played by Jude Law) had been moved into position. Yep… Turns out, we are not seeing a genuinely-new, standalone corner of a beloved world, but seeing it slowly evolve back into the inescapable story of the characters and settings we already know. Nothing, it seems, can happen in the Wizarding World without falling back on Hogwarts.
Make or Break
After the unexpected critical and commercial disappointment of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Warner Bros. initiated an intentional slowdown of the franchise’s production. The every-other-year formula was retired as creatives went back to the drawing board. A second screenwriter was brought on to assist Rowling for future entries. Then, filming of a third Fantastic Beasts film started (get this) March 16, 2020 – literally the day the world shut down for COVID-19. Maybe it was a sign, because the film’s production has been cursed since…
In 2019, J. K. Rowling herself took up an unusual crusade by joining in the “culture wars” of the era against portions of LGBTQ+ community. At first, Rowling held to the line that her divisive comments on transgender people’s rights had merely been taken out of context… but then she wouldn’t stop making them. Obviously, Rowling is within her rights to voice her perspective on socio-political issues, but her opinion reads as uncharacteristic given the author’s otherwise staunch support for progressive politics, gay rights, and the young, diverse, politically-active audience she’s fostered – and indeed, shaped into progressives – through Harry Potter.
Nearly every Wizarding World star including Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, and Fantastic Beast’s Eddie Redmayne loudly, publicly disavowed Rowling’s stance, which has also earned condemnation from GLADD, Warner Bros., and Universal Studios. (Vladimir Putin and American political conservatives crafting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation has directed cited and applauded Rowling’s tweets and essays on the subject – both endorsements which Rowling rejects.)
Rowling has largely exited the spotlight by avoiding interviews, red carpets, or high profile Potter retrospectives in favor of, apparently, staying home and writing Fantastic Beasts and anti-trans think-pieces. Regardless of your opinion on the matter, you must admit: it’s a very odd wagon for Rowling to hitch her legacy to – seemingly custom-made to make her an enemy of the generation shaped by (and most likely to purchase and consume) her work. It’s unclear if Rowling thinks she’ll somehow be proven “right” in her political and social stance one day – even posthumously – but what is certain is that it’s poisoned the well for many Potter devotees today, who can’t overcome the “ick” factor inherent in adding to her billion dollar wealth.
Johnny Depp had already made headlines in 2016 for an acrimonious divorce from his ex-wife Amber Heard, who alleged that Depp abused her during their relationship. In 2018 – just after The Crimes of Grindelwald exited theaters, new accusations and audio released as part of a court case saw headlines frame Depp as a “wife beater.” Scores of Wizarding World fans vowed to boycott any further films with Depp involved. In November 2020, he announced that he was stepping out his by-then central role of Gellart Grindelwald. (He’d shot just one scene for the third film, but contractually was still paid his reported $17 million salary.)
New audio tapes would later recast Heard herself as the aggressor in her and Depp’s arguments, causing another faction of fans to suggest they’d boycott any further Fantastic Beasts films if Depp was not in them. In other words, a lose-lose.
Fantastic Beast’s other star – Ezra Miller – has their own fair share of issues. In April 2020, Miller was filmed apparently choking a woman and throwing her to the ground at a bar in Reykjavik, Iceland. Then, on March 28, 2022 Miller was arrested for another bizarre alleged physical confrontation at a bar that allegedly ended in the actor stealing people’s wallets and threatening to kill them. Miller was pulled from the promotional circuit for the third Fantastic Beasts film (set for release just two weeks after the actor’s arrest), likewise axing Miller from promotion around the long-delayed 2023 flick The Flash (likely contributing to its underperformance, too.)
Which brings us to the not-much-anticipated third entry, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Now fully re-connected to the Potter mythos, film three’s marketing revolved not around Scamander (or, y’know, fantastic beasts), but Jude Law’s Dumbledore, Mads Mikkelsen’s Depp-replacing take on Grindelwald, and a return to Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. The plot follows the Wizarding World’s role in World War II (positioning Grindelwald as a literal Hitler), leaving New York and Paris behind for Berlin. (Hey – the Fantastic Beasts series is globe-trotting, just like fans had speculated!)
When it was released in in April 2022, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore received not just its own middling reviews (it has a very bad 46% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a cringey 47 on Metacritic)… it was a financial flop. Earning just $400 million (against a known $200 million budget), the film likely ended up losing money for Warner Bros. once marketing costs are considered. Put simply, Fantastic Beasts isn’t the hit Warner Bros. hoped, and it’s certainly not the next Harry Potter.
According to an in-depth dissection of the Fantastic Beast’s “derailment” by Variety, low enthusiasm, mediocre reviews, the Depp, Rowling, and Miller controversies, and the financial failure of The Secrets of Dumbledore have pretty much made it obvious: Fantastic Beasts is highly unlikely to see the five films Rowling hoped. But more devastatingly, Fantastic Beasts has failed to open up a new corner of the Wizarding World. It hasn’t made fans fall in love with a new set of characters. And worse, it hasn’t presented a place and time that fans are eager to inhabit. And that’s a big problem for Universal, who bet big on Fantastic Beasts as the anchor of their new theme park… Read on…
Wizarding World Refresher
To catch you up to speed: in 2010, Universal opened The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal’s Islands of Adventure, and the theme park industry hasn’t been the same since. Universal’s “Living Land” model (dictated by J. K. Rowling’s protection of her IP) created a “Living Land” plucked from the screen, built to-scale and giving fans the chance to not just ride a Harry Potter ride, but exist in the world of Harry Potter. The screen-accurate recreation of the village of Hogsmeade and the towering Hogwarts castle gave visitors a chance to step where their favorite characters stepped; to shop where they shopped; to eat where they ate. Imagine Disney’s horror when guests at Universal’s Wizarding World queued hours not for rides, but to get into gift shops. Adhering to Rowling’s requirement for only “in-universe” food and drink, house robes, wands, quills and ink, owls, and of course, Butterbeer flew off the shelves.
The very next year, infamous cable giant Comcast made a surprise $14 billion majority acquisition of NBCUniversal. Industry insiders expected that Comcast would quickly spin off Universal’s parks into a standalone entity, then sell it to a private equity group or a competing entertainment company. But – reportedly due to the unimaginable success of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Comcast didn’t sell the parks at all. Instead, the company publicly doubled down, saying they’d invest wildly in Universal Parks & Resorts… And they did.
Fast forward to 2014, when Hogsmeade’s follow up – The Wizarding World of Harry Potter: Diagon Alley – opened next door at Universal Studios. Stunningly immersive, Diagon Alley again recreated a fantastic place drawn up by filmmakers to unthinkable ends. Totally habitable and incredibly magical, Diagon Alley is considered by many to be the best “Living Land” in the industry, even topping Disney’s retaliatory measures (Cars Land, New Fantasyland, Pandora: The World of Avatar, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, etc). More to the point, it practically printed money. The Wizarding World showed all that Universal Creative was capable of, and made a fortune doing it.
For a moment, Universal seemed poised to recreate that magic with a third park in Orlando, and a third Wizarding World to go with it.
Epic Universe
Announced in 2019, Universal’s Epic Universe will be constructed on a whole new campus south of the existing Universal Orlando Resort. This third theme park – set for a 2025 debut – will be the first new Disney or Universal park in the country since 2001’s Disney California Adventure. And fittingly, it’ll make use of every trick the industry’s learned since… meaning Epic Universe will be entirely made of Wizarding-World-style, immersive, “Living Lands.”
Though technically Comcast hasn’t pulled back the curtain on what exactly will inhabit Universal’s Epic Universe, in their typical “worst-kept-secret” style, everybody knows. Allegedly, Epic Universe will reportedly be made of:
- A central, celestial land serving as the park’s “Hub” from which guests will pass through portals into fantastic worlds…
- A copy of Super Nintendo World with both a “Mario” and “Donkey Kong” sub-section, each with their own anchor attraction. (The first half of Super Nintendo World is already open in Japan, and soon to debut in Hollywood.)
- A land based on Universal’s Classic Monsters, allowing guests to step into Frankenstein’s Village and Dracula’s Castle in an ode to Universal’s black-and-white, genre-defining horror films of the ’30s and ’40s.
- A land carry guests the Kingdom of Berk, from Dreamworks’ How To Train Your Dragons
- A third Wizarding World… and of course, that’s where the questions begin.
Allegedly, from Epic Universe’s inception, that third Wizarding World was always set to be a 1920s Paris, drawn straight from the screen in Fantastic Beasts 2. In some ways, it makes sense. Universal is really, really good at recreating streetscapes (that’s kind of their thing) and a 1920s Paris sounds like a kind of place we’d like to inhabit, regardless of a Wizarding World connection. Rumors of a Fantastic Beasts-themed attractions set in the world of Newt Scamander were all but confirmed… Until the unexpected happened, and Rowling’s new Wizarding World turned out to be a bit of a flop…
We won’t bother detailing all the “word on the street” regarding the fate of the alleged Fantastic Beasts land, because frankly, you could spend an hour going into Alicia Stella’s archive of will-they-or-won’t-they-use-Fantastic-Beasts coverage – including detailed rumors, site plans, permits, and patents regarding possible rides for the third Wizarding World – on Orlando ParkStop.
And ultimately, with permits filed and ground cleared, it seems highly unlikely that the third Wizarding World will be anything but a 1920s Paris… but what if…? On the last page, we’ll dig into some of our Blue Sky ideas for what a third Wizarding World could look like if Universal had the opportunity to rethink their next move with Epic Universe…
To start, let’s face facts: Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley certainly represent the two most theme-park-able places seen in the Wizarding World to date (even a 1920s Paris, while lovely, wouldn’t exactly scream Wizarding World, and it’s not like there’s a particularly iconic place in Paris like a Diagon Alley that we saw in Fantastic Beasts).
So with full knowledge that Universal Orlando’s third park is probably stuck with Fantastic Beasts at this point, we still wanted to offer our ideas for where else in the Wizarding World we’d like to travel… There’s clearly not an obvious “third place” in the franchise that would translate so beautifully and directly to the theme park model (i.e. rides, shops, restaurants, etc.) as Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley, but a few of these might be worth expanding on…
1. The Ministry of Magic
There’s no doubt at all that the most obvious “third place” to bring to life in the Wizarding World is the headquarters of the Ministry of Magic – the governing body of the British Wizarding World. Not only is the Ministry headquarters a distinctive, iconic physical “place,” but it’s one that houses plenty of ride-worthy experiences, from warehouses stocked with prophesies to offices filled with flying paper plane memos; Dementor-guarded courtrooms to the iconic atrium (above), site of a duel between Voldemort and Dumbledore.
Allegedly, the Ministry of Magic was pretty much guaranteed to be added to Universal Studios Florida’s Wizarding World (which makes sense since the Ministry is located in London, just like Diagon Alley) as a future expansion. Weirdly, the prevailing rumor now is that that ride has been moved to Epic Universe’s Wizarding World, even though the land itself is still set in the Fantastic Beasts’ version of Paris. That would mean that the land will be set in 1920s France, but its major ride will see guests pass through the Floo network and emerge in the British Ministry of Magic during Potter’s timeline, decades later (which seems uncharacteristically lazy for the theme park Wizarding World that literally created the immersive, in-universe land).
If we had our way, we’d say: make the Ministry the whole land, not a ride within it. There are fully indoor lands out there (including Mermaid Lagoon at Tokyo DisneySea, Kung Fu Panda Land of Awesomeness at Universal Studios Beijing, and some EPCOT pavilions like The Land and The Seas), and given the funding available for Potter projects, we have no doubt that Universal could build an entire Wizarding World of Harry Potter – Ministry of Magic land. Imagine guests entering via the Ministry’s recognizable corridor of Floo Network fireplaces (above) to find bustling wizards and witches en route to their offices; places to grab a working lunch and stock up for Ministry missions; this is a space we want to enjoy, not just see as part of a queue line.
To that end, Orlando ParkStop does mention a few rumors for what a Ministry ride could look like. One supposedly-axed attraction saw guests gather into a Wizengamot courtroom for the trial of Dolores Umbridge (occuring after the movies have concluded, and thus expanding the Wizarding World’s lore) that would see Umbridge escape, the courtroom break apart into trackless ride vehicles, and a race through the Ministry alongside our heroes spring into action.
ParkStop reports that the current plan for Epic Universe is for a headlining ride making use of the Ministry’s multi-directional elevators, using clever scene-switching effects to travel through the Ministry’s offices, courtrooms, corridors, and warehouses. It sounds great! But it also feels like rather than just being a ride nonsensically-placed in a 1920s Paris that most guests won’t even recognize as being a Wizarding World locale, the Ministry should just be expanded to be the land itself. Right?
2. Godric’s Hollow
Godric’s Hollow is a quaint village located in the West Country of England. It’s a tiny town named for its most famous resident – the long-dead Godric Gryffindor for whom Hogwarts’ Gryffindor house is named. It’s also a town with significant history in the Wizarding World, including the childhood home of the Dumbledore family and – most importantly – the cottage in which the Potter’s hid from Voldemort, still half-destroyed from the Dark Lord’s spell backfiring all those years ago. Yep, it’s Godric’s Hollow where Voldemort cast the spell that scarred Harry Potter and left the Dark Wizard powerless.
In many aspects, Godric’s Hollow is highly theme-park-able. Because it’s a cute little English village, the town is home to an inn, a church, and no doubt various shops run by magical and Muggle alike. At the center of town is a war memorial that – when approached by the magically-inclined – transforms into a statue of the Potter family. It’s also home to the cemetery where Lilly and James Potter were laid to rest – a significant (if slightly irreverent for a theme park) landmark.
Of course, it’s also not very theme-park-able, because nothing significant really happens there in the films’ timeline, and even if it did, hiding a showbuilding in a little English village wouldn’t be an easy task. In other words, it would be interesting to see Godric’s Hollow in person, but maybe as more of a walkthrough attraction than as one of the four anchoring lands of Epic Universe.
3. Ilvermorny
First described by J. K. Rowling on the official canon-containing website Pottermore, Ilvermorny is the school of Witchcraft and Wizardry serving North America. Yes, the United States’ own version of Hogwarts. Supposedly started by an Irish witch named Isolt Sayre who traveled to the United States by ship in 1620, the magical school is located somewhere in Massachusetts, though its mountainous location is hidden from Muggles – er, uh, “No-Majs” to use the American lexicon – by dense fog.
Like Hogwarts, Ilvermorny has four houses named for native mythical creatures – Thunderbird, Wampus, Horned Serpent, and Puckwudgie – representing adventurers, warriors, erudites, and healers, respectively. Very, very little is known about Ilvermorny or the magical New England fishermans’ villages that no doubt serve as its gates. Likewise, there’s a world of distinctly-American magical creatures who could inhabit the pine forests, river valleys, and mountain streams that surround it. And that’s the best news yet.
At last, there’s literally an entire untouched corner of the Wizarding World left to explore; one not tied to the existing mythology, and one where Warner Bros. and Universal Creative can work together to literally create a whole new world. Ilvermorny is a sketch in the Wizarding World’s canon, ready to be filled in. Universal’s Epic Universe could be the place to do that. Imagine being able to “live your own Wizarding World adventure,” exploring how the magic of the Wizarding World inspired colonists to build enchanted coastal villages and tame sea monsters; how American students buy wands made of wood reclaimed from Isolt’s ship; how students are sorted and what classes they attend… It’s all waiting to be written.
When the details of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge were made official, one of the more controversial elements of the land was that rather than selecting a planet already seen in the Star Wars films, the area would be set on a planet invented just for the parks called Batuu. Though the heroes and villains we know would be on hand – and though the land looks and sounds and feels like Star Wars – some fans just couldn’t get behind the idea of eschewing Tatooine or Coruscant or Naboo in favor of a planet no one had heard of or seen before. Disney’s call to “Live Your OWN Star Wars Adventure” was clever, but not everyone got on board.
It’s possible Universal would run into the same issue here, but with Hogsmeade and Diagon Alley so perfectly capturing the most iconic spots in the Wizarding World we’ve seen, what would be the harm in bringing to life a part of the Wizarding World we haven’t? I mean, if it came down to 1920s Paris or Ilvermorny, wouldn’t the latter be more exciting for fans? To see a part of the Wizarding World that’s never been given physical form before, exclusively at Universal Orlando?
Magic in the Making
Look, Universal wants a third Wizarding World land. Who could blame them? And sure, at this point, we’re 95% sure it’ll be a 1920s Paris rooted in the aesthetic of Fantastic Beasts, maybe with a non-sequitor Harry Potter ride inside of it.
Just as James Cameron directs the future of Avatar far more than actual desire for more Avatar movies, it’s likely that Rowling’s push for Fantastic Beasts will see the franchise grow come hell or high water… and a whole land dedicated to it in Epic Universe may simply be part of her demands that no one dare push back against. Also like Avatar, there’s every chance that the theme park land will resonate beautifully, somehow “severed” from its source material and standing strong all on its own!
We just won’t know until we learn more about the future of Fantastic Beasts or Epic Universe. Until then, our ideas are just “armchair Imagineering.” Which is why we want to hear yours. Do you think Fantastic Beasts deserves a permanent land in Universal’s new park? How would you feel if the land looks like Fantastic Beasts, but its rides are set in Harry Potter’s time? If you could build your own Wizarding World, where would you like to see it set? Let us know in the comments below and when you share this feature on social media!
