Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has come out and fans of the series are either put off by the controversy surrounding much of the movie and franchise as a whole or just not interested in heading to theaters. Why? Well, because the film is still at a series low. Despite being ranked #1 overall international title for the third consecutive weekend with $38.3m on 24,617 screens and in 67 overseas markets, it still hasn't reached the level of success the previous films in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them series has.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore captured a $3.4M global IMAX box office for the third weekend, pushing it's total to $18.7M. North America contributed to $1.6M of IMAX box office total, taking the Domestic IMAX sum to $6.7M with international IMAX numbers coming in at $1.8M and pushing the total internationally to $12M.
It isn't truly surprising for a number of reasons. Outside of the typical COVID factors playing into low box office totals, the third Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them movie was also plagued with a number of reasons that fans didn't want to support. The series, as a whole, is suffering from creator J.K. Rowling's attack online on the trans community and her dismissal of trans women.
Rowling, while a major source of the upset and rightfully so, isn't the only reason fans are not excited about the Wizarding World and, particularly, this movie. The film also stars Ezra Miller, the actor who is also Barry Allen in the upcoming movie The Flash, and they have recently been arrested in Hawaii.
This movie is also a series shift for the franchise as former star Johnny Depp was replaced by Mads Mikkelsen in The Secrets of Dumbledore, which would have been a draw for fans of Mikkelsen, but paired with everything else working against the movie just hasn't seen the box office results that the other films had.
What all of this means for the future of the Harry Potter franchise and the world that Rowling created is up in the air. A low box office for something like this, which used to be a draw for movie theaters, shows that there is a shift in what audiences are willing to shell out money for and whether it was the controversy surrounding the movie or other factors playing in, it seems as if Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a downfall for the series.