Fantastic Beasts 3 will now be called Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore and it will now not open on July 15, 2022, but on April 15, 2022. The title “news” merely suggests that they now leaning into the Harry Potter nostalgia and Jude Law’s “young dumbledore” will also be likely to co-lead alongside the famous Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander as they will together team up to take out the diabolical Gellert Grindelwald.
Now to be fair, as the last film was called The Crimes of Grindelwald it will make some sense for the next one to be titled “the X of Character Y”. If this pattern now continues we can now expect the fourth film to be called I dunno, The Pontifications of Barebone or something to that effect. In the end, we will probably never get one titled Fantastic Beasts and How To Cook Them. As for the release date changes and that’s where it gets a little trickier.
With very much better reviews and words of mouth, $660 million on a $200 million budget is just fine. Now the fear is that the third film will play like divergent series: Allegiant, Dark Phoenix and Terminator: Dark Fate and third go-round. The new April 15 date puts the film against the more kid-friendly competition. The opening for a week after Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and concurrently with Dream Works Animation’s The Bad Guys.
So if we speculate, if WB really wants to justify all the five Fantastic Beasts movies, the third will one will have to be good so that viewers get excited to watch it even if the fourth one underwhelms at the box office. The film was already delayed from the expected November 2022 release date in an attempt to fix what went wrong with the second part. So now we can only hope that the third film be more character-based and focused and it will less heavy when it comes to plot. The film should also have the ability to wrap it up in the fourth film if The Secrets of Dumbledore absolutely flops.