Variety also found out, courtesy of a survey from comScore, that 51% of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them’s viewers insisted that they’d come to see the film because of its link to the Harry Potter universe.
All of this suggests that the same audience that went to see the very first Harry Potter film, the 2001 release The Sorcerer’s Stone, and followed the franchise fervently over the course of its increasingly popular seven sequels up to 2011’s The Deathly Hallows — Part 2, were enchanted by the Newt Scamander spin-off.