'Harry Potter' Spin-Off 'Fantastic Beasts' Bumped Up to a 5-Movie Franchise

Exactly how fantastic do you expect this year's Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will be? Hopefully, you're pulling for something pretty damn fantastic, as Harry Potter mastermind J.K. Rowling just let it slip that the franchise-in-progress has now been bumped up from a trilogy to a five-movie extravaganza.

Rowling gave the news directly to stoked AF Harry Potter fans at a special sneak peek event ahead of Fantastic Beasts' theatrical release in November, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Rowling has already wrapped up work on the plot for all five films, with director David Yates sneaking in a few small details about the second film in the Beasts franchise, due in 2018.

Whereas the first film will see Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) roaming New York City after losing track of a case full of mysterious creatures, the untitled sequel will take him to another "big capital city." Rowling, Yates added, recently wrapped up the film's script.

Redmayne previously spoke with the good people over at Collider about joining Rowling's universe, even recounting his own Harry Potter fandom. "I read the books and I then started watching the films and it was just like the most wonderful escapism," Redmayne said. "Like every year or two, you got to go and sort of dive into this world and J.K. Rowling's capacity to kind of, really sort of—her stories straddle genres in the most amazing way."