Harry Potter’s Fantastic Beasts on Display at London Museum

London’s Natural History Museum is about to get a Fantastic new exhibit, bringing some of the creatures, beasts, and monsters seen on the big screen in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter feature films to its patrons. “Fantastic Beasts: The Wonders of Nature” will be open at the museum from December 9 of this year until August of 2021. The exhibit took two years of planning apparently and had its opening pushed back by seven months due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In an interview with The NY Post, head curator Lorraine Cornish said: “It’s a bit unusual for us. It’s really a creative and interesting way of messaging that people and the planet can thrive together.”

The exhibit will combine real animals with the make-believe ones from the series, spotlight the likes of The occamy, The demiguise, and the niffler. Connections will be drawn between the animals of myth that appear in the Wizarding World like dragons, unicorns and mermaids and the real beasts that have roamed the earth that likely inspired them including the link between dinosaurs and dragons or manatees and mermaids. Despite the name of the exhibit, props from the two Fantastic Beasts movies and the eight Harry Potter films will all be on display.

Potter fans eager to see the display don’t have to worry about traveling internationally during the COVID-19 pandemic, as the exhibit will go on tour once it concludes its stay at the Natural History Museum. In fact after concluding in August of next year, “Fantastic Beasts: The Wonders of Nature” will go on a five year international tour, sponsored by both Warner Bros. and the BBC. Stay tuned for details on that tour as we learn them.

Production on the third Fantastic Beasts movie is currently underway with Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne set to return once again as Newt Scamander. Little is known about the plot of the third movie but we do know that it will move the action at least partially to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, marking yet another international adventure for the series after the first two films visited the United States and Paris.

The new film from Warner Bros. will also see the return of Katherine Waterston as Tina Goldstein, Dan Fogler as Jacob Kowalski, Ezra Miller as Credence Barebone, and seemingly Johnny Depp as Gellert Grindelwald. They will also be reunited with Professor Eulalie ‘Lally’ Hicks (Jessica Williams) as she has a bigger role in this sequel. There’s a rumor that classic Harry Potter character Hagrid will make an appearance.

Fantastic Beasts 3 is currently set to be released on November 12, 2021.