Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them Tracking Towards $90 Million Opening Weekend

Accio money! The Harry Potter franchise is set to expand tomorrow when Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them hits theaters. The highly anticipated film is the first spin-off of JK Rowling's magical franchise, and it looks like it will rank in some impressive box-office numbers. New projects from Box Office Mojo anticipate the blockbuster to earn $90 million this weekend.

Fantastic Beasts will debut in more than 4,000 theaters this weekend and undoubtedly reach number one at the box-office. Its projected earnings eye more than $90 million this opening weekend, a number which would dethrone Marvel's mystical Doctor Strange's earnings earlier in the month.

Of course, the opening of Fantastic Beasts can expect this kind of number because of its predecessors. The Harry Potter films stand as the highest-grossing movie series of all time. When the final Harry Potter film was released in July 2011, the film grossed more than $1 billion worldwide.

If Fantastic Beasts tracks with its current box-office predictions, then it will outdo the premiere of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as the first movie rake in $90.3 million. If it goes a bit further, it could outpace Prisoner of Azkaban which earned about $93 million. It is already expected to beat out previous films like Order of the Phoenix and Half-Blood Prince who both earned less than $78 million.

Clearly, it looks like moviegoers have missed the wizarding world. Critics agree that Fantastic Beasts will be a must-see film for Harry Potter fans. The movie debuted to a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, and ComicBook.com's Kofi Outlaw calls the movie "an authentic and warm welcome back into the wizarding world."

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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.

[H/T] Box Office Mojo