With the Fantastic Beasts script having sold more than 420,000 copies, fans seem up for buying the Harry Potter author’s work in any format – but is it any good?
It’s 11pm on a Thursday night and a gaggle of twentysomethings are crowding around a tub of Lego in London’s Waterstones Piccadilly, making wands. It’s an hour before the latest JK Rowling adventure, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, is released in UK cinema screens. At the same time, Rowling’s script is being released as a handsome hardback on its own. Perhaps no other author could publish their jaunts into screenwriting as bestselling books, but this is Rowling, after all: the one author who can inspire adults to don school uniforms at midnight and head back to class – albeit one where they can drink Voldermorjitos.
More than 20 years since the first book was published, there is still no equal to Harry Pottermania in literature or the flood of merchandise it has spawned: backpacks, chess sets, pyjamas, Lego, wands, soft toys. Even scripts published as books, a strange if lucrative endeavour (421,000 copies of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them have sold in the UK alone) continue to attract fan excitement and marketing pizzazz. With Crimes of Grindelwald, booksellers up and down the country are preparing for a huge weekend of sales, with Waterstones holding more than 240 events across three days – efforts that even some fans feel more befits a fully fledged novel.
Related: Thanks, JK Rowling, but I’ve had it with Harry Potter | Pauline Bock
Related: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald review – Jude Law's Dumbledore shines
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