After delivering one of the most ambitious films ever made and winning the Oscar for Best Director, it appears that Gravity filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron isn’t keen on going small-scale for his next feature.  Reporter Nikki Finke tweets that Cuaron is “deep in talks” to take the director’s chair on the Harry Potter spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.  Should the deal come through, Cuaron would return to the world of Harry Potter a decade after helming arguably the best film in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.  The script for Fantastic Beasts was written by author J.K. Rowling herself, and though the story takes place in the same universe as Harry Potter, it’s set in an earlier time period and doesn’t involve any of the main characters from the series.  Hit the jump for more.

If Cuaron signs on to direct Fantastic Beasts, he won’t only be reunited with Rowling, but also with producer David Heyman, who produced all seven of the Harry Potter films in addition to Gravity.  This is incredibly exciting news for a number of reasons, and it signals that Warner Bros. isn’t moving forward with Fantastic Beasts solely with the goal of exploiting the Harry Potter franchise—they’re aiming to make a genuinely great film.  Here’s hoping everything comes together, because this is a match made in Heaven.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them will open in theaters on November 18, 2016, so filming will likely get underway sometime early next year.  Read the official description of the film, per Rowling, below:

“Although it will be set in the worldwide community of witches and wizards where I was so happy for seventeen years, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the Harry Potter series, but an extension of the wizarding world. The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the Harry Potter books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway.”