Okay, I'm a big Harry Potter fan. I own all the original books, I've been on Pottermore several times, own all the movies on Blu-ray, and I had "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" in my hands the second I was able to do so (street dates continue to be the bane of my existence working at a retail store). So when they announced they were doing a movie on "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" I was thrilled. Ecstatic even. Then they announced that it was going to be a trilogy and I got a little more worried, but I figured they would probably be able to pull it off. After all, there's a lot to pull from in the Wizarding World, especially during the time before Harry's story happens.

Now they recently have announced that it's actually going to be five movies total. Don't get me wrong, more of the Wizarding World is great...but only if it's GOOD additions to what we have, and I'm starting to worry it won't be. We've seen this happen over the years multiple times when a studio ends up splitting a movie into multiple parts, some are better examples of this not working well than others. While it worked for the final Harry Potter movie because of how much ground they had to cover story-wise, and for "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay" due to how thematically different the two halves of the final books were, it was less effective when "Twilight" did it in the last movie. "The Hobbit" trilogy suffered because how thin the story got stretched with so much filler needing to be added to get three movies worth of plot into it, and the "Divergent" series was such a train wreck made worse by splitting the final movie into two that the last movie might only be a television show now with none of the original actors involved.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is the fate that "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" is doomed for. It's entirely possible that they'll handle this spectacularly, and we'll get another great set of Harry Potter movies to add to our collections. What I'm fearful of is that they don't actually have enough plot already in mind to make this many movies and are just wanting to cash in on the momentum of the Harry Potter phenomenon once again since it was revived with the release of "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" in both book and play form. While it was never fully died out before that point, the announcement of that book and the new movie kicked things into a whole different gear on the hype train. Who knows, maybe the next movie won't be based on anything related to "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them," maybe it'll be based on "Hogwarts: A History" or one of the other millions of possible sources for story, even "Tales of Beedle the Bard" could be a goldmine if added in right.

I love Harry Potter, and I'm excited that we are still getting so much from the world, and most of them are rich and engaging stories we can be proud of. I just don't want to see that slip away because some studio thought they could make a bunch of money. That's a story we've seen play out far too many times, and Sirius Black did not spend 10 years in Azkaban for Harry Potter to share in that fate.