The wizard Percival Graves in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them looks like he’s definitely tracking some other wizards with the help of a map and some mugshots. Are we looking at an attempt to bring in escaped prisoners from the North American equivalent of Azkaban?
Warner Brothers released new images from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and while most of them are people, places, and creatures we’ve seen before in trailers and posters, there is a new single shot of Percival Graves in front of a map cluttered with pins, symbols, mugshots, lists, and reports. While the image isn’t quite high-res enough for us to make out what these lists and reports say, the images on the right side of Graves’s map definitely look like wizarding world mugshots, not unlike the one we saw of Sirius Black in the wanted posters after he escaped in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Could these witches and wizards be escaped prisoners from North America’s own Azkaban-like prison? If so, what are they up to and are they working together?
We know that Azkaban has a dark and storied history. Once the island fortress of dark wizard Ekrizdis, Azkaban is known for being impenetrable and inescapable*. Azkaban was founded to put an end to escape attempts that were drawing too much attention on the mainland. The prison was also an attempt to ensure that neither the Dementors who had been attracted by Ekrizdis’s dark magic nor the prisoners would pose a threat to Muggles and to Britain as a whole.
Might North America have a similar prison? And if it does, if these mugshots represent escapees, how did they manage to get out?
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them arrives in theaters November 18.
*You know, except for Sirius Black. And Bellatrix Lestrange. And Augustus Rookwood. Plus a few others.
