Rowling to conjure 5 ‘Fantastic Beasts’ – ‘Rogue One’ trailer excites ‘Star Wars’ fans

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LOS ANGELES, Oct 14, (Agencies): “Harry Potter” fans got fantastic news on Thursday. Author J.K. Rowling said that the Potter spinoff movie franchise “Fantastic Beasts” will consist of five films, up from the previously announced three.

“We set a trilogy as a placeholder because we knew there would be more than one movie, but … we’re pretty sure it’s going to be five movies,” Rowling told participants in London gathered at a fan event.

The British author of the best-selling “Harry Potter” books was a surprise addition at a question-and-answer event with the “Fantastic Beasts” cast in London and Los Angeles that was broadcast across the world.

The news was welcomed by excited screams from the audience, while the cast, including Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne, looked surprised as they heard it for the first time. The films will be released by Warner Bros, a unit of Time Warner Inc.

A 4-minute “Fantastic Beasts” featurette shown at Thursday’s event finally hinted at the wider plot of the film that has so far been under wraps.

The planned movies, designed as prequels to the Potter stories, will trace the rise of a powerful wizard named Gellert Grindelwald and his eventual 1945 duel with Albus Dumbledore, the popular wizard headmaster from the Potter stories.

Wizard

“We’re talking about the first time a wizard rose and threatened the world order. This was always where I was interested in going. This is what I wanted to do,” Rowling said in the featurette.

She added in the 4-minute video that the new films will tie to the Potter stories in “surprising” ways.

Fans at the event were shown the first 10 minutes of “Fantastic Beasts,” which opens on Nov. 18.

The film depicts Redmayne’s “magizoologist” Newt Scamander arriving in New York City in 1926 with a case of magical creatures, amid growing strife in the wizarding world.

When Scamander’s creatures escape and wreak havoc, it poses a bigger threat to the magical community as they may be discovered by the nonmagical humans in the city.

“Fantastic Beasts” taps in to the eight-film Potter franchise that officially concluded with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” in 2011. That series took in more than $7 billion at the global box office.

Rowling’s seven-book series sold more than 450 million copies worldwide.

Earlier this year, a new sold-out London play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” cast a spell all over again, and the book version of the script become a best-seller.

The final trailer for the hotly-anticipated “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” dropped Thursday, giving fans more insight into the beginnings of the saga’s rebel alliance two months ahead of the movie’s release.

The first standalone “Star Wars” story, “Rogue One” is set just before “A New Hope” — the original film in the blockbuster series — and stars Felicity Jones as rebel Jyn Erso alongside Mads Mikkelsen and Forest Whitaker.

Following a grand “Star Wars” tradition, the trailer teases a film preoccupied with the themes of family loyalty and the conflicts of parenthood — with the usual weird aliens, light sabers and stormtroopers thrown in for good measure.

“Jyn, whatever I do, I do it to protect you,” Mikkelsen’s Galen Erso tells his little girl at the opening of the 157-second spot, which premiered during ABC’s “Good Morning America.”

In a big reveal, Galen is shown to be instrumental to the Empire in building their weapon of mass destruction, the Death Star.

The strained father-daughter relationship appears to spur on Jyn — a delinquent with a string of convictions for forgery, assault and theft — as she embarks on a mission to destroy the planet-sized weapon.

The first full-length trailer released in August gave fans their first glimpse of Darth Vader since 2005’s “Revenge of the Sith.”

Viewers are again treated to a split second cameo by the Dark Lord of the Sith, this time from the front as he listens to the Empire’s Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) boasting about the awesome power of his new toy.

It has not been revealed which actor has been hired for Vader’s latest big screen outing, due to hit theaters in the United States on Dec 16.

The character was voiced in the original trilogy by James Earl Jones, now 85, while 81-year-old David Prowse donned the iconic cape and helmet.

Last year’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” made more than $2 billion worldwide, and analysts have backed “Rogue One” to dominate this year’s box office.

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