Harry Potter: 15 WORST Plot-Holes In Wizarding World Movies

9. The Niffler Magic Conundrum

There's a major pitfall that all prequel stories have to adhere to that way too many of them fall into: fundamentally you cannot establish lore or technology in the past which we know does not exist in the mainline present of the previous films. You can't invent a quicker means of travel in a sci-fi than the prequel's own future has shown possible at that point in time and you can't establish something that would be incredibly useful to resolve a situation in the future in a prequel. Because everyone will then wonder where that solution was during that event.

That specific issue arises in Fantastic Beasts 2 when Newt reveals another use of Nifflers: he shows that you can use gold to get the creature to map a crime scene, establishing (somehow, it's not really clear how) exactly what happened so the "detective" can then track anyone involved. It's clever and it's pretty key to the Crimes Of Grindelwald plot.

So where was this magical ability in the future when Sirius Black was wrongly accused of killing Peter Pettigrew? Wouldn't a lot of hassle have been saved if someone had got a Niffler in to map the crime scene and reveal that Black killed no-one and Pettigrew escaped? It's sloppy and now it means we're going to have to see the Nifflers all killed off to extinction for it to make any sense.