Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them Tracking For $75 Million U.S. Opening Weekend

The Harry Potter universe is being expanded later this year when Fantastic Beasts and Where To [...]

The Harry Potter universe is being expanded later this year when Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them hits theaters, and if current tracking holds up, Warner Bros. is looking at a nice payday.

Fantastic Beasts showed up on tracking, and early estimates put it at racking up around $75 million on its domestic opening weekend (via THR). Some are more conservative with the number, hovering around $70 million, but it's important to note that Warner Bros. still has three weeks to make their big final marketing push to drive that number up.

The film should also have relatively long legs and should benefit from the Thanksgiving weekend. If that turns out to be the case, it would be music to Warner Bros. ears, as they've already signed off on 4 more films in the Fantastic Beasts franchise. Fantastic Beasts will expand on what has been alluded to in the Potter films, and J.K. Rowling recently explained how America's wizarding world differs from Englands.

"In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, you're learning about a part of magical history that that's talked about in the Potter books but you never see. I'm getting a chance to tell that now. In the 1920's, magic developed very differently in America. Because of this tension, their wizarding world is in a state of high alert at that time. This is new material. There are ways in which we connect to the Potter books that I think people will find surprising. 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."

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is an all-new adventure returning us to the wizarding world created by J.K. Rowling. Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) stars in the central role of wizarding world magizoologist Newt Scamander, under the direction of David Yates, who helmed the last four Harry Potter blockbusters. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them opens in 1926 as Newt Scamander has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident...were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt's fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds.

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them brings the world of magic to theaters on November 18.

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