Biggest Mistake Fantastic Beasts Made Ultimately Ruined The Series For Good
And what is that mistake, you ask?
Well, the Fantastic Beasts series committed several significant mistakes, for which it was criticized. But really, much of them, including lack of direction and shoving characters into plots where they did not belong, boiled down to one thing, which a Redditor summarized for us rather perfectly:
"These movies are called "Fantastic Beasts" and aren't fantastic and contain relatively few beasts."
The series' problem was lack of uniting vision and identity, or, more precisely, trying to switch its identity mid-way.
The original Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them mostly – mostly – delivered what its title promised (even if the execution was flawed), with the film focusing on Newt Scamander and, well, fantastic beasts. Although there arguably still were not enough fantastic beasts and too much wizard politics on screen.
But starting from the first sequel, the movie series had effectively turned into a Young Dumbledore story, with little warning (well, the titles have warned us, but such turn was still jarring).
Which might have been fine, had series been built up from the ground as such. While some of the fans complained that Dumbledore's backstory and his battle against Grindelwald are not a good movie material, because we already knew everything worth knowing about that, The Secrets of Dumbledore was not a bad movie in itself. But the series hadn't been built up as a Young Dumbledore series.
And when Newt Scamander got relegated almost to a side character, in supposedly his own movies – when he got repeatedly dragged into plots, which only were related to him and his goal of tracking down and studying various magical creatures, though rather tortured contrivances – people got dismayed. And, well, the fact of fantastic beasts playing even lesser roles in the series named after them also did not endear the sequels to the audience.
Consequently, the Fantastic Beasts series took a crippling blow while just trying to take off the ground, and might never recover. As we've mentioned before, at this point the future of the series is uncertain. It remains to be seen, whether it could be revitalized with more sequels, or whether Warner Bros. is going to abandon it.