'Fantastic Beasts 2' May Screw Up The Harry Potter Timeline
Who among us hasn't daydreamed about when our favorite elderly teachers were young and sexy? Is the answer ... everybody? Well, apparently the good people making the new Harry-Potter-less Harry Potter movies didn't get that memo. The upcoming Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes Of Grindelwald prominently features Jude Law as a younger, suaver Dumbledore, who seemingly moonlit as a menswear model for whatever the Wizarding World's equivalent of GQ is.
Now news has broken that another beloved Hogwarts educator will make a youthful cameo in the movie: Minerva McGonagall. Played by Dame Maggie Smith in the original series of films, 35-year-old Fiona Glascott has reportedly stepped into the role. And as further evidence that J.K. Rowling was bitten by George Lucas during a full moon, unnecessarily shoehorning this beloved character into a prequel totally craps all over the series' established continuity.
You see, the new movie takes place in 1927, but Professor McGonagall was previously believed to have been born in 1935. Why is this? Well in Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix, we're told that McGonagall started teaching at Hogwarts in 1956, following a two-year stint at the Ministry of Magic after graduation. Fans concluded that if she graduated in 1954 (and since her birthday is October 4, according to Pottermore) she would have started attending Hogwarts in 1947, just before her 12th birthday. That would mean she was born in 1935 -- the same year as Elvis Presley, the Dalai Lama, and Woody Alle- er, He Who Shall Not be Named.
Not only does The Crimes Of Grindelwald take place before her birth date, but if we're to go by the actress' age, McGonagall is in her mid-30s in 1927, meaning she's way older than any of us thought.
While some fans are already pissed that this blatant disregard for canon shakes the believability of a world filled with flying brooms and murderous trees, we haven't seen the film yet. It's still possible that McGonagall shows up in some kind of flash-forward -- or Merlin forbid, Rowling throws in a goddamn Time Turner ... again.
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