Becca Paez
The Paw Print
On September 12 Warner Bros announced that J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, would be writing the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
The movie follows the adventures of Newt Scamander, the author of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in New York’s secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter. However, Rowling has announced that Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is neither a prequel nor sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world.
Scamander has long been part of the Potter universe, ever since he got a brief mention in the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
One of Hogwarts’ esteemed former headmasters, his image occasionally popped up in the wizarding school’s living portraits. Scamander had been an expert Magizoologist — a student of magical creatures — ever since a childhood fascination with hippogriffs, and he went on to work for the Ministry of Magic. Beginning in 1918, he spent nearly a decade researching and writing Fantastic Beasts, traveling to every corner of the globe in his spare time to research the wizarding world’s most fascination creatures.
“It all started when Warner Bros. came to me with the suggestion of turning Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them into a film. I thought it was a fun idea, but the idea of seeing Newt Scamander, the supposed author of Fantastic Beasts, realized by another writer was difficult. Having lived for so long in my fictional universe, I feel very protective of it and I already knew a lot about Newt. As hard-core Harry Potter fans will know, I liked him so much that I even married his grandson, Rolf, to one of my favorite characters from the Harry Potter series, Luna Lovegood” said Rowling in her statement to the press.
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