Six Things I Want To See In The New Harry Potter Film Series

Warner Bros. announced that J. K. Rowling will write a screenplay inaugurating a new series based in the magical world she created for Harry Potter. The new film will begin in New York and be based on the in-world textbook Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, focusing on its author Newt Scamander. Ms. Rowling: here’s my wish list.

Bring back Dumbledore

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The new movie will take place 70 years before the events of the Harry Potter series, which places it sometime in the 1920s. Beloved Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore was born in 1881, and was credited with discovering the 12 uses for dragon blood. Maybe he came up with a few of them alongside magizoologist Scamander.

An American Wizarding school

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One of the best things about Goblet of Fire was the expansion of the Harry Potter mythology by introducing characters from other schools for witches and wizards. Although Scamander graduated from Hogwarts, he was an academic who eventually became headmaster of the school. A visit earlier in his career to one of Hogwart’s American counterparts wouldn’t be out of the question.

A borough for witches and wizards

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Locations such as Diagon Alley, Platform 9 and ¾s, and Number 12, Grimmauld Place have shown us that the magical community can hide among the Muggle one. A hidden-by-spell locale seems necessary for a dense area like New York City.

Author Jonathan Safran Foer has a nice story, which became part of his novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, about a sixth borough of the city that disappeared years ago. Maybe in the world of Harry Potter, a similar sixth borough “vanished” when witches and wizards cut ties with the Muggle world.

The magical version of a Gatsby party

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New York during The Roaring Twenties? My mind goes straight to The Great Gatsby. It’ll be a crime if Scamander doesn’t make it out to Long Island for a night of revelry among the flappers of the Wizarding world.

Class commentary

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Rowling has a history of playing with prejudices and expectations, if not addressing issues of class head-on, that spans the Harry Potter series as well as her novel A Casual Vacancy. It’s hard to imagine these topics won’t appear in the new movie in some form. Scamander’s history at the Ministry of Magic includes a stint in the Office for House-Elf Relocation and the creation of the Werewolf Register. Those two types of creatures have been fertile ground for Rowling in the past.

The magical publishing world

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The movie’s action will presumably take place during Scamander’s research for Fantastic Beasts. The book was commissioned in 1918 by Augustus Worme, and was published in 1927. While Obscurus Books, the publisher Worme worked for, is located back in London’s Diagon Alley, New York is arguably the publishing capital of the world. A peek at the Wizarding publishers who have to deal with books like the snarling Monster Book of Monsters and the transparent Invisible Book of Invisibility could be fun.