Box Office: ‘Fantastic Beasts 3’ Becomes Warner Bros.’ Fourth Covid-Era Movie To Top $400 Million

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was the biggest grossing film on Vudu last weekend. The threequel, written and directed by J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, is currently available for free on the various video on demand platforms. Fantastic Beasts 3 made $400 million at the global box office this weekend. That doesn't mean the film is a hit. The previous under-$100 million domestic and over $400 million worldwide earner were not hits. A franchise that was never going to reach the promised land had a graceful exit point in this threequel.

$400 million worldwide is less than the $659 million global gross of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. The drop for the second chapter wasn't that bad, although the poor reviews and lackluster buzz (along with just $155 million domestic, down 32% from the $234 million domestic gross of the first film) led pretty much everyone to predict a crash on par with the third film. Since Fantastic Beasts 2 earned $659 million on a $200 million budget, it was worth a chance at hoping I was wrong. It's time to move on now that we're not.

The final reel of The Secrets of Dumbledore brought to a close the core characters of Newt, Tina, Jacob and Queenie, as well as the conflict between the two main characters. If David Zaslav wants to quickly get some, it is possible that the series should have been about finding and helping magical creatures in the first place. Fantastic Beasts should be a movie series. The Secrets of Dumbledore is not a franchise saved but a bullet dodged.

The four Warner Bros. films that have passed $400 million worldwide are: In the month of March of 2021. If New York and LA theaters had opened in August/September of 2020, Tenet would have made a lot of money. WB has seen Dune, Fantastic Beasts 3 and The Batman cross the billion dollar mark. Four of the 16 movies that have done the deed have come from the Dream Factory. That's 27% of the Covid-era total, but not yet counted.

Three of the 11 $400 million-plus grossers thus far have come from Sony. Only one of WB's four films was a comic book superhero movie, and that was The Batman. Disney's theatrical and streaming fortunes are almost entirely dependent on Star Wars and Marvel, with all the talk about how Warner Bros. Discovery will be turned into the next Disney. It's important to be careful with what you want.