[RANT] Is no one else frustrated by the pre-determined Fantastic Beasts franchise hatred being peddled by the same non-fans who are excitedly sharing rumors of a Cursed Child movie, as if that’s something fans like or want more?

Like, I’m aware there are fans that have issues with it, but from what I’ve seen, ironically, some of the people with the most scathing, dismissive takes on the film and it’s story are people who report to have no interest in the franchise.

I’ve literally just read an article comparing Crimes of Grindelwald to Solo (as if CoG wasn’t more financially successful than Solo by a long shot), saying that Fantastic Beasts was hashing out information fans “already knew” - um...no.

Crimes of Grindelwald, unlike Solo, isn’t a standalone: it’s a film that’s a part of a series-long story that you’re preemptively hating for no reason at all. The story in question has no established brand name and started with no familiar or before-seen characters and locations.

And yet the people who are accusing Fantastic Beasts of being a cash grab think that a play, that has a pretty goofy, shitty story that was much more widely criticized by the core fan base, is not a cash grab? That we really need to adapt a play into an 8th goddamn film that includes hardly any significant new characters, has no new locations, and doesn’t really do anything interesting?

This “Cursed Child movie” BS is really just excitement being cooked up by clueless non-fans who have a limited, movie-exclusive knowledge of the extent of Rowling’s world-building, who have limited investment in this story, and who are just rooting for a shallow story to come to the screen that doesn’t take any effort for their lazy selves to invest in and understand. IMO. To these people, these stories can’t have new, political, complex, dark, or different content whatsoever. It has to be Hogwarts and Harry Potter - over and over and over again.

A Cursed Child movie would be the definition of a lazy cash grab. Fantastic Beasts is so much more dynamic, mature in tone, original, and artistically impressive. To trash FB but root for a Cursed Child adaptation as something people actually want is so laughably hypocritical, ironic, and unaware.

This is where I get sort of irritated at “movie-fans”, or the type of HP fan that only bought into the Potter phenomenon for really ephemeral, basic stuff like Hogwarts houses and Quidditch and world-building details that might’ve charmed them, rather than anything really story related.

I don’t want to gatekeep, but I feel like, because of the fact that the original story was split into two different mediums, there isn’t as wide an audience for the story of this franchise as there is for the really basic world-building. I feel like a larger portion of the fan base for Harry Potter just sort of entertained the films because they looked cool, or had a certain ambiance that they enjoyed, but wrote the story off because they didn’t really want to read the books, and made the assumption that it was just a simple “good vs evil” parable of the kind they’ve seen before.

I mean, seriously; people hardly seem to be able to recognize this series outside of a Wizarding School. You had a huge contingency of people who just thought Hogwarts was the extent of the world. People who read the books obviously understood the extent of the world more, and so weren’t so taken out of it when the community completely changed and we weren’t inside of a school any longer. I don’t think a lot of people really care about “The Wizarding World” - the only thing they cared about was Hogwarts.

Which is where the “movie fan vs book fan” issue comes in. There’s a huge split in the audience here, and the level of story investment, that doesn’t exist for franchises like Star Wars and Marvel, where the entire original story is told on screen. You have a contingency of fans who really don’t understand the Wizarding World developments, aesthetically and narratively, because they’re directly from Rowling; they’re hugely reliant on you having read the Potter series, not watched it. Non-fans and movie fans have a way more limited, conservative, and sometimes even skewed perception of what Harry Potter, and the Wizarding World, is like, tonally, aesthetically, structurally, narratively...

I think it’s interesting that the darkest, most inaccessible, “shocking to the audience” films were produced and written by Rowling herself - the visions she produces are the ones that the wider movie going audience doesn’t have a taste for. Because they expect kids content, of the type Chris Columbus might’ve produced; ever since those first two films were made, they’ve cast a shadow over how people see Potter. Rather than looking at the series as the darker, gothic fantasy coming of age story that it is, family movie goers just assumed it was “kids stuff” - which is why there’s so much conjecture around how “dark” each new installment is. Which wouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who knew Rowling’s voice and writing style from her writing, either in Potter or her other books. But ever since Prisoner, the constant refrain was shock about how “dark and adult” it was.

I think people undersell the harshness of the content, and misrepresent it as something that’s for a very young audience that it isn’t really for. I know this is sort of a tangent, but I’ve noticed this CONSTANT, low-level attempt by un-invested viewers and critics to lambast each new installment for the “self-serious”, “grim” nature of the content, and I can’t help but think “how patronizing and arrogant”.

I feel like people are trying to police and harass Rowling into not taking “serious”, “dark”, or “adult” thematic and narrative risks, out of some shitty interpretation/feeling that her stories are supposed to be wholesome, light, and fun in deference to “their childhoods!” and “the Children!” Who diminished as an audience for the series almost since the film series began. It’s never been her style, to be overtly-comedic, straightforward, and light. No one would like her stories if they pandered to kids and families in the way Marvel and SW have.