Fantastic Beasts 3's Rotten Tomatoes Compared to Other Harry Potter Movies
The newest Wizarding World movie is here with Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, but how does its Rotten Tomatoes score compare to other Harry Potter movies? The original batch of Harry Potter movies saw big success in Rotten Tomatoes and at the box office, but the Fantastic Beasts movies have struggled to meet the same highs.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is the third installment of the Fantastic Beasts franchise and brings the series even closer to the events of the originals by introducing a young Dumbledore played by Jude Law, while also juggling the recasting of Johnny Depp's Gellert Grindelwald with Mads Mikkelsen assuming the role.
The first Harry Potter movie was released in 2001, kicking off an eight movie streak of Fresh Rotten Tomatoes scores through to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 in 2011. While the Fantastic Beasts movies aren't a direct continuation of the Harry Potter movies, they do exist in the same Harry Potter movie canon, although they certainly haven't benefitted from the Rotten Tomatoes streak of the originals.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore's 49 percent Rotten Tomatoes score is lower than every single Harry Potter movie and is only higher than one of the Fantastic Beasts movies. The original eight Harry Potter movies average 85 percent in Rotten Tomatoes with the lowest scoring movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 coming in at 77 percent, while Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them scored 74 percent, and its sequel, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald earned the Wizarding World's lowest Rotten Tomatoes score at 36 percent.
While Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is the middle-scoring installment of the three Fantastic Beasts movies, it's also several points below the 53 percent average for the sub-franchise. Considering the high 85 percent average Rotten Tomatoes score for the original Harry Potter movies, simply coming in with a score wouldn't inherently be a problem, but with a Rotten 49 percent score, The Secrets of Dumbledore is a full 36 points lower than the Harry Potter average Rotten Tomatoes score.
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore's 49 percent score doesn't only make it one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores in the Wizarding World, but it also continues a trend with the Fantastic Beasts movies keeping them firmly in a lower tier of Rotten Tomatoes scores than the original eight movies. The first installment, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is the only movie of the three Fantastic Beasts movies to earn a Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score, but its 74 percent score is still lower than every single Harry Potter movie.
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald may be an improvement on Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald's franchise-low 36 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, but at just 49 percent, it's still 11 points short of a Fresh score and reinforces the Fantastic Beasts' three-movie average of 54 percent. The Secret of Dumbledore isn't just one of the lowest scoring Harry Potter movies in Rotten Tomatoes, but it's also the franchise's lowest box office opening, it spells trouble for WB's original 5 movie plan for Fantastic Beasts.
Despite Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore's low Rotten Tomatoes score from critics, its 79 percent audience score makes it the Wizarding World's movie with the biggest split between critics and audiences with a 30 percent split. Ironically, the next highest critic-audience split is Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, with its 36 percent critic score coming in 18 points lower than its 54 percent audience score.
Unfortunately, in The Crimes of Grindelwald's case, both the critical and audience score are still Rotten, while The Secret of Dumbledore's 79 percent audience score is clearly Fresh. The franchise average is only nine points of separation, although the average for the three Fantastic Beasts movies is 18 points, while the Harry Potter movies only saw critics and audiences differing by an average of six percent.
In many cases, a strong Rotten Tomatoes audience score can overcome poor critic scores, since the audience score is a bigger indicator of a movie's potential for success than the critical score, but considering Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore's poor box office opening and the continued struggles of the Fantastic Beasts franchise, the high audience score might not have the power to overcome the consequences of the franchise's downward trend.