The ever-expanding Harry Potter universe just got a whole lot larger.
The Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them spin-off will be a five-film franchise, JK Rowling said at a Warner Bros fan event in London on Thursday.
"I'm pretty sure that there are going to be five movies, now that I've been able to properly plot them out," Rowling, who wrote the screenplay - her first - for
Fantastic Beasts
, said.
"We always knew that there would be more than one."
Three Fantastic Beasts films were initially anticipated, with the last in the trilogy expected to come out in November 2020.
Warner Bros Pictures had announced in August that a second movie in the Fantastic Beasts series was already in the works.
Director David Yates teased on Thursday that the second film would take place in another global capital city - not the upcoming pic's New York City setting.
Following Rowling's revelation about the five films, attendees at the fan event were shown footage from the first 10 minutes of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
It opens with investigators tracking the unseen beasts in the countryside, followed by a variety of headlines from 1926 papers and references to the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald.
One of the movie's stars, Eddie Redmayne, said his character Newt Scamander was "incredibly passionate" in an answer to a fan question.
He also acknowledged that the success of the Harry Potter franchise has created high expectations.
"I feel an incredible amount of pressure," he added.
Yates also said the upcoming first Fantastic Beasts movie, which hits theatres in November, will feature a cameo by a young Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grendelwald - characters from the original Harry Potter movies.
The second instalment is slated for worldwide release on November 16, 2018.
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