Rather like the fantastic beasts catalogued by the magizoologist Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the problems facing the series come in assorted shapes and sizes. “The stench?” He is referring to the aroma of the muggles – non-magic folk, that is – seated all around him, but anyone who has been paying attention to the fortunes of the once-invulnerable Wizarding World would be forgiven for reading the line as a commentary on the franchise itself. The movie begins with the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (played by Mads Mikkelsen) slinking into a tearoom, his nose twitching. It is in this volatile climate that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, the third in the Harry Potter spin-off series, is being released. What the Wizarding World wouldn’t give today for a controversy of that stripe: one that doesn’t result in lost revenue, accusations of hate speech, and the previously unimaginable spectacle of Vladimir Putin declaring that he knows how Rowling feels. In 2009, Matt Latimer, a former speech writer for George W Bush, claimed in his book Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor that the Harry Potter creator had been dropped from consideration for the presidential medal of freedom because of suspicions in the administration that her books “encouraged witchcraft”. H ow quaint it feels now to look back on the sort of low-level furore with which JK Rowling once had to contend.
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