Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has had the worst box office opening weekend of any Harry Potter film in cinema history. The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third film in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, which follows the adventures of magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), and the eleventh film in the broader Wizarding World franchise, which includes the eight Harry Potter films starring Daniel Radcliffe as the titular boy wizard. This new entry follows a young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) organizing forces to face off against the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) while explosive family secrets surrounding the parentage of young wizard Credence (Ezra Miller) are exposed.
The film has gone into its opening weekend amid a swirl of controversy involving those in front of and behind the camera. Primarily, LGBTQ+ groups and allies have been boycotting the film after Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling made continuous transphobic posts on Twitter and her personal blog. However, Fantastic Beasts 2 star Johnny Depp was also removed and replaced with Mikkelsen after being involved in a lawsuit with The Sun after they ran an article about the accusations of abuse made by his ex-wife Amber Heard, who he has accused of defamation. Even more recently, star Ezra Miller has landed themselves in hot water after they were arrested in Hawaii and had a (later dropped) restraining order issued against them by a couple they were staying with, a news story that brought with it reports of "frequent meltdowns" on the set of The Flash 2023.
Per THR, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has now opened to a record low for the franchise. Although it did top the charts for the weekend, sending last weekend's Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to #2, it made a relatively meager $43 million on the domestic front. This is still the fourth-best opening of 2022 so far, but that's not entirely impressive in these pandemic-depressed early months, and that total landed it below the mid-tier Uncharted (which opened at $44 million) and blown completely out of the water by other franchise pictures Sonic 2 ($72 million) and The Batman ($134 million).
Every film in the Fantastic Beasts has opened lower than every film in the Harry Potter franchise, which peaked with the final entry Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II in 2011 ($169 million) and bottomed out with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix ($77 million). While the first Beasts film, 2017's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, proved itself able to perform on the same playing field as lower-tier Potter with an opening of $74 million, the subsequent sequels have experienced a consistent drop. The second film Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, which was poorly received by audiences and critics alike, took in a $62 million opening, and The Secrets of Dumbledore nearly doubled that drop by opening at $19 million lower than its predecessor.
The future of the entire franchise depends on the performance of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. While its box office performance is reasonable for a mid-tier pandemic-era feature like The Lost City or Death on the Nile, the big budget franchise needs to provide studios with a compelling, risk-free reason to invest in continuing the series. At one time the franchise was envisioned as featuring at least six films, but if the analysts at Warner Bros. think the next film will continue an exponential drop, they may not see fit to greenlight Fantastic Beasts 4.
Source: THR
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