The first trailer for J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has just been released, and presumably to many people’s delight (but to my personal dismay), it looks as though the beasts in question in the New York-set Harry Potter-world film are not as NY-specific as, say, roaches, bedbugs and Pizza Rat.
Rather, as revealed in the trailer, the “fantastic beasts” mentioned in the film’s title come from within a certain Newt Scamander’s magical suitcase. Scamander, played by Eddie Redmayne, is a famed magizoologist who’s stopping over in New York after having collected a trove of strange creatures on a global excursion — and these creatures happen to escape and begin to wreak magical havoc on “no-maj” (American for Muggle) New York, in a plot that seems to fall somewhere between 12 Monkeys and The Goosebumps Movie.
The trailer spends its first 30 seconds on an incantation lighting up the Warner Bros. logo with a wand, then shows us some very fragmentary glimpses of 1926 wizard-world NYC, all set against a somewhat brooding score (a surprise, given that the stakes here don’t sound nearly as high as, say, the rise of Voldemort).
The film will arrive November 18, 2016.
Watch the trailer: