Although it sounded last week like Gravity and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban helmer Alfonso Cuaron was planning on returning to the Wizarding World for the upcoming Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Global Post today has an update straight from Cuaron himself who now reveals that he’ll be passing on the director’s chair this time around.
“I have a lot of love for that universe,” Cuaron says, “and I tremendously admire J.K. Rowling, but today, for the present, projects based around lots of visual effects don’t attract me. I’m coming out of a five-year process of doing visual effects and now I sort of want to clean my palate of that a little bit.”
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, based on J.K. Rowling’s world of witches and wizards and inspired by Harry Potters Hogwarts textbook of the same name, will follow the adventures of the book’s fictitious author, Newt Scamander. The first in a planned trilogy set in the Wizarding World, the story will feature magical creatures and characters, some of which will be familiar to devoted “Harry Potter” fans. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the “Harry Potter” books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is set for release on November 18, 2016.
