3. It's An Artificial Extension Of A Finished Story - Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them
Quite why Harry Potter is a done franchise should be pretty damn obvious; it finished. After dragging out the final book into two movies (this was the semi-restrained, pre-Hobbit days), Warner Bros. wrapped up the whole thing with an explosion of CGI and fan tears, proudly claiming "It all ends" on the posters. Thanks to the source novels, Harry Potter ended in a way rare in franchise filmmaking; on its own terms and wrapping up the main story. To Warner Bros., however, that sort of narrative resolution isn't desirable if it reduces what was once their biggest cash-cow to a nostalgic property scraping in small change from DVD and Blu-Ray sales. Luckily for them, J.K. Rowling has been unable to move on from Hogwarts, returning time and again to expand the wizarding world. Although so far it's just been short context pieces for website Pottermore, it's only a matter of time before she starts giving Albus Serverus Potter some adventures of his own (in print the epilogue is set in 2016). Before that inevitability (and their all but required film adaptations), Rowling's scripting trilogy Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, which dramatises the antics of schoolbook author Newt Scamander. Talk about scraping the bottom of the butterbeer barrel.
