Ranking Every Harry Potter & Wizarding World Film Worst To Best

Things are not going well for the Wizarding World franchise right now.

Not only have many of its prominent figures become embroiled in controversy, but the first two Fantastic Beasts films and stage play 'Harry Potter and the Cursed Child' have all served as inadequate follow-ups to the Harry Potter series overall.

Now, the long-delayed Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore has finally arrived, albeit with little fanfare, so it's a good time to reflect on what is now a collection of eleven Wizarding World films, to see how they stack up.

It's also refreshing to get a reminder that, however badly things may be going at this time, the Wizarding World franchise was once a genuinely great series of films, capable of genuinely magical entertainment.

Please note: The Harry Potter films will not be judged on what they left out from the books - they will be judged on their own merits as films, as they should always be.

Maybe you can guess which instalment is ranked in last place, but how do the others stack up? Which is the best? And where does Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore fit in?

The catastrophic second instalment of the Fantastic Beasts leg of the franchise is a film that doesn't really have a plot. Instead, it's too many characters going around in circles looking for any sort of narrative and eventually arriving at a howlingly awful finale.

'Messy' isn't even the word. A broken, surprisingly mean-spirited and completely anti-structural car crash of a movie with no emotional weight, no suspense, no character development and nothing but sequel set-up, Crimes of Grindelwald makes Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker look like a masterpiece of coherence.

Case in point: Late in the film, the story literally pauses for ten minutes so that a character can explain, via a nauseating flashback, that she caused her baby brother to drown in a shipwreck when she was a child.

As you'd expect from the Wizarding World series, the performances are terrific, with Jude Law's Albus Dumbledore being arguably one of the best performances in a terrible film ever, and the production design, musical score and visuals are sublime. Sadly, such things fail to ever hide the fact that this is one of the worst-written Hollywood films in recent memory.

If this franchise ever delivers something worse than this, that'll be a miracle of the worst kind.