Fantastic Beasts: JK Rowling finishes Harry Potter spin-off script

JK Rowling has completed the script for the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, set 70 years before Harry arrives at Hogwarts.

Harry Potter franchise producer David Heyman told the Daily Mirror at yesterday's London premiere of the Paddington movie that Rowling had written a "wonderful" script.

"It's early stages... I'm just really excited about it," he said.

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David Yates, who directed the last four Harry Potter films, will be directing Fantastic Beasts, with filming due to begin next year. The spin-off is expected to be made into "at least" a trilogy and is due to hit cinemas in November 2016.

The films will follow the global adventures of Newt Scamander, a magizoologist (a person who studies magical creatures) before he writes the textbook that Harry studies seven decades later at school.

The Fantastic Beasts book was first written by Rowling under the pseudonym Newt Scamander in 2001 for Comic Relief. It claims to be the "fifty-second edition" and features a forward by Albus Dumbledore and "hand-written" notes from Ron, Hermione and Harry. Chapters include "An A-Z of Fantastic Beasts" and "Why Magizoology Matters".

Rowling has described Fantastic Beasts as neither a prequel nor a sequel, rather an extension of the wizarding world. She tweeted last month that she was "tweaking" her screenplay and offered her followers a few hints about the plot of the first film, which is said to follow Newt's adventures among "New York's secret community of witches and wizards".

Rowling gave her followers an anagram to solve, which was later translated to: "Newt only meant to stay in New York for a few hours."

She also assured fans that Newt would "not want to harm beasts" and that he "would never run away from anything" as he is a "Hufflepuff with guts".