Filming has started on Fantastic Beasts 2 and we’re excited!
When it comes to spoilers about the upcoming sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, look no further than here!
Main filming started Monday on the second Fantastic Beasts movie and Pottermore verifies something hinted at in the first movie: Dumbledore and Newt are a team fighting against Grindelwald. In Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a few clues about the Dumbledore-Newt team popped up, surrounding Grindelwald himself, and possibly Grindelwald’s mark, the symbol of the Deathly Hallows.
When Grindelwald, as Graves, is questioning Newt in his MACUSA office, he asks Newt the best-known quote from Fantastic Beasts, “What makes Albus Dumbledore so fond of you?”. This question seemed out of place, asked by an Auror to a handcuffed “criminal” he had never met before. But Grindelwald and Newt each seemed to feel the weight of the question.
For Grindelwald, this may have been simple jealousy based on his previous relationship with Dumbledore. But Grindelwald seems too calculating to breach such a question openly for petty personal reasons. He may have been implying that Newt is working under some instructions from Dumbledore. And Newt didn’t clear this up with his answer.
Instead of seeming a bit surprised that he would even be asked something so unrelated to the situation, Newt intentionally shrugs the question off as if to say it’s nothing to him.
Newt’s new spell
The fact that Newt was in New York City at all, instead of having continued to Arizona to release the Thunderbird, could have been a request by Dumbledore. Dumbledore was not openly fighting Grindelwald in 1926, but he may have already been using a network of spies to keep track of Grindewald as his old friend became more and more dangerous. He possibly received information that made him think Grindelwald had fled to New York after escaping the Aurors in Europe. That is, of course, speculation, but other clues point more clearly to a Newt-Dumbledore dynamic duo.
In the subway showdown, while battling with the Aurors against Grindelwald, Newt captures him using a spell that the written screenplay shows was created and saved for possibly just this purpose.
This whip spell is definitely of Newt’s invention. It looks like the inspiration for it came from Graphorn tentacles, and the last breeding pair of Graphorns were living in Newt’s case at that moment. We saw them earlier hugging Newt with these tentacles, which look like soft versions of their horns.
Newt says in his textbook that Graphorn horns repel most spells, so they do seem like a useful substance against unexpected hexes from a highly skilled, sociopathic wizard like Grindelwald. But Newt isn’t the kind of wizard who would be inventing dueling spells on his own for random purposes. That paragraph from the screenplay seems to say that he invented this spell, for just this situation, as if he expected to run into Grindelwald.
Grindelwald’s last words
And finally, there is Grindelwald’s parting line. While marching out of the subway, led by Aurors, he passes Newt, and stops to throw some kind of meaning-laden snark at him.
"“Will we die, just a little?”"
He shoots Newt a pointed gaze that looks like, “You know exactly what I mean”. As the screenplay says, Newt just looks bemused. And that is it, that is all we have to know why Grindelwald would have made sure to say this to Newt.
We are so accustomed to this kind of unexplained clue from reading Harry Potter, the kind of clue that made us read the books 67+ times trying to figure it all out and stay up all night to argue fan theories with each other. So this line definitely means something big.
A best guess at this point among fans is that Grindelwald is referring to something having to do with the Deathly Hallows. As a young man, Grindewald introduced Dumbledore to the Deathly Hallows quest, and Grindelwald has taken on the Deathly Hallows symbol as his mark.
He would have every reason to think that Dumbledore would have told Newt of how much the Deathly Hallows quest meant to this aspiring wizard world ruler – objects that could defeat death.
Grindelwald’s parting shot is a leaf falling into the kind of trail that J.K. Rowling loves to put into her stories: clues we fret over for years before realizing where it all fits in. And we usually find out that these kind of clues carry the weight of the entire story. Here’s hoping we find the connection in Fantastic Beasts 2, when we finally meet young Dumbledore!
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Read more about Fantastic Beasts 2 in Pottermore’s new article.