Fans of any massively popular original franchise hope that their creator won't betray them like George Lucas did Star Wars fans. After two decades of anxious anticipation, fans of the space opera were rewarded by Lucas' grand vision for his greatest villain's roots. And the path to those roots ran, apparently, through Racist Dog Whistle Town with lengthy detours through the Tax Code & Parliamentary Procedure Access Road. Whenever we think of origin stories, this Patton Oswalt bit comes to mind.
J.K. Rowling has at least shortened the wait time before introducing her own shadow origin story. Fantastic Beasts has been a minor box office disappointment (only $75 million, yawn), but fans might flock in greater numbers if they knew that they were going to see Voldemort's roots. Our evidence is scant, but then so was evidence that Dumbledore was a gay man.
So, the franchise, as Vanity Fair notes, starts in Voldemort's birth year of 1926. And we know that Depp will play Voldemort precursor (and eventual victim) Gellert Grindelwald. We also know that the series concludes in 1945. That's significant because it's the year Dumbledore defeats Grindelwald, the end of World War II, and Voldemort's final year at Hogwarts. So it doesn't take that much of a leap of faith to think that the series could set the stage for Voldemort's full heel turn, the defeat of his mentor, and the ushering in of a global epoch defined (kind of!) by peace and cooperation.
Now that we've typed all this, we realize that the stage is being set for Grindelwald's and Dumbeldore's duel being somehow related to the explosion of the atomic bomb. If that is truly the case, we are going to scream.
Correction: A previous version of the story mispelled Gellert Grindelwald's name as "Gellert Grindewald." We have corrected the spelling and we hope Mr. Grindelwald can forgive us this error.
AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT