JK Rowling Says A Young – & Gay – Dumbledore Will Feature In Future Fantastic Beasts Movies

When it was first announced that JK Rowling & Warner Bros. were planning on expanding the Harry Potter film universe with Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them, the studio was confident enough to say they were already planning a trilogy. Well, the first film hasn’t arrived yet they’re already going bigger, revealing that the hope is now to make five movies.

At a fan event, Rowling also confirmed that a younger Dumbledore will appear in later instalments. She also hinted that perhaps we’ll finally get to see the Hogwarts headmaster as a gay man, rather than the gay in name only person he’s been since Rowling confirmed his sexuality in 2007. She has suggested that the movies will look at Dumbledore’s backstory, filling out more of what happened between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, after they developed a close attachment as teens – with Dumbledore having a perhaps reciprocated crush on his friend – but then the latter went off and became an incredibly powerful dark wizard.

We will have to wait and see whether we see Dumbledore in a relationship or otherwise expressing his sexuality (or indeed dealing with the homophobia of the past, as the first Fantastic Beats film is set in 1926, when Dumbledore would have been in his 40s), but it would certainly annoy a lot of people if it remained coded or completely ignored.

Fantastic Beasts & Where To Find Them arrived in cinemas on November 18th.