It’s been all but confirmed up until this point, but Warner Bros. used a shareholder meeting –which also featured a big announcement about DC Comics movies scheduled until roughly the heat-death of the universe – to officially lock down the **Harry Potter **spin-off trilogy Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them and the expansion of its Lego Movie series{
The first Fantastic Beasts film, adapted by J.K. Rowling from her novella and set to be directed by Potter cinematic veteran David Yates, already has a set date of November 18, 2016. Two sequels are dated for 2018 and 2020, and Warner Bros. let slip that there will be “at least” those three movies. We suppose it makes sense that the studio would want to keep going back to the Potter universe well.
That initial film and its follow-ups will be very loosely based on Rowling's universe-expanding textbook about magical creatures. It’s set in the wizarding world and boasts creatures and characters both new and familiar to Potter but is not a direct prequel to the current stories, instead set 70 years before Harry sets foot in Hogwarts. That puts the setting somewhere around 1921, when Magizoologist and credited author of the book Newt Scamander would have been about 24 according to in-world chronology.
As for the Lego Movie franchise, we already knew most of the details, with the sequel in development and now bumped, as expected, to 2018, Ninjago next up for a 2016 release and the recently announced Lego Batman film slotting in between them in 2017.