![]() From one angle, the idea of announcing a five-film cycle at the get-go felt like a mark of hubris (if we’re being grand about it) or an act of cynical exploitation (if we’re not). ![]() Now we don’t use Rowling’s name or work in the classroom.”Įven before its current travails, there was a rinky-dink quality to the Fantastic Beasts franchise. The young people I’ve worked with in the last five years, many of whom are trans, feel betrayed by someone who was a guiding light to them, who gave them a place to feel safe, where ‘difference’ was celebrated. “This is something millions of people are invested in. “The reason Emma Watson’s Bafta comment went viral is because this isn’t a limited issue,” says Nadin. She has tarnished her own brand as far as huge numbers of them are concerned.”įor evidence, check out the online response to Emma Watson’s appearance on stage at last month’s Bafta ceremony, where the actor amplified her previously stated message of support for the trans community by telling an appreciative audience: “I’m here for all of the witches.” “These conversations go on among young people whenever the books or films are mentioned. “It isn’t just Film Twitter or even YA Twitter,” she says. The novelist Joanna Nadin, who has written more than 90 books for children and adults including the bestselling Worst Class in the World series, believes the significance of Rowling’s comments is far more wide-reaching than that. Photograph: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Warner Bros JK Rowling at the premiere of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in London. There are probably enough people keen on the series who don’t know, or care, what Film Twitter is saying.” “I’m not sure they will prove catastrophic, however. “The fact that both these things have happened to people involved in Fantastic Beasts has cast a bit of a pall over the series for some audiences,” she says. Anna Smith, a film critic and host of the podcast Girls on Film, concedes that the franchise has taken a few knocks. The question now is whether the damage is irrevocable, and even severe enough to kill off future projects. The world of Harry Potter and its Fantastic Beasts spin-offs has undoubtedly been marred by this. ![]() This all occurred alongside the controversy that has swirled around Rowling over the past few years, ever since a long essay she wrote about her gender-critical feminism put her at the centre of the row about trans rights. Last week, the actor was arrested for disorderly conduct in a Hawaii karaoke bar reports from the same night allege that Miller burst into a private residence and threatened the couple living there. Two years ago, another of the film’s stars, Ezra Miller, was videoed grabbing a woman by the throat in a bar in Reykjavik. One of its stars, Johnny Depp, who played Grindelwald at the end of the first Fantastic Beasts film and throughout the second, was asked to leave by Warner Bros after losing his libel case against the Sun newspaper, which had referred to him as a “wife-beater” following accusations of domestic violence made against him by his ex-wife Amber Heard. Rather like the fantastic beasts catalogued by the magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the problems facing the series come in assorted shapes and sizes. “The stench?” He is referring to the aroma of the muggles – non-magic folk, that is – seated all around him, but anyone who has been paying attention to the fortunes of the once-invulnerable Wizarding World would be forgiven for reading the line as a commentary on the franchise itself. The movie begins with the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (played by Mads Mikkelsen) slinking into a tearoom, his nose twitching. It is in this volatile climate that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the third in the Harry Potter spin-off series, is being released. What the Wizarding World wouldn’t give today for a controversy of that stripe: one that doesn’t result in lost revenue, accusations of hate speech, and the previously unimaginable spectacle of Vladimir Putin declaring that he knows how Rowling feels. In 2009, Matt Latimer, a former speech writer for George W Bush, claimed in his book Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor that the Harry Potter creator had been dropped from consideration for the presidential medal of freedom because of suspicions in the administration that her books “encouraged witchcraft”. ![]() How quaint it feels now to look back on the sort of low-level furore with which JK Rowling once had to contend. ![]()
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