'Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them' cast & news update: JK Rowling's 'Harry Potter' spinoff movie starts filming

"Harry Potter" spinoff movie "Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them" has officially started filming Monday in Warner Bros. Studios in Leavesden, England.

According to Forbes Magazine, it was announced last October 2014 by Warner Brothers Chairman Kevin Tsujihara that there will be a trilogy spinoff based from the "Harry Potter" cinematic universe. The film is based on the book by JK Rowling. According to IGN, the script will be written by the British author herself and directed by veteran "Harry Potter" director, David Yates.

Other veterans joining the team are producer David Heyman, editor Mark Day and production designer Stuart Craig, according to the New York Daily News. They will be joined by famed costume designer Colleen Atwood and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. It is set to be released in theaters on Nov. 18, 2016 in both IMAX and 3D.

"Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them" will be about "The adventures of writer Newt Scamander in New York's secret community of witches and wizards seventy years before Harry Potter reads his book in school," according to the movie's IMDB page.

The new movie will be filmed at Warner Bros. Studios in Leavesden, UK, the same place where all 8 "Harry Potter" films were made. According to the International Business Times, the movie will be set in New York in the 1900s, and because of the time difference there will be no cross over's from the characters of the "Harry Potter" books.

The book of the same name by Rowling is fictionally penned by Newt Scamander, a writer and magizoologist or a person who studies magical creatures, who will be played by Eddie Redmayne. Joining Redmayne are Collin Farrell as Graves, Katherine Waterston as Porpentina, Dan Fogler as Jacob, Alison Sudol as Queenie, and Ezra Miller as Credence according to Access Hollywood.

Rowling recently revealed that two of the lead characters in the new movie were distantly related to a member of Dumbledore's Army.

"Well, I think it's widely known that that characters of (Porpen)tina and Queenie are sisters, but not that their surname is Goldstein," the British author tweeted the update.

According to the report by Cinema Blend, Anthony Goldstein was a Ravenclaw student who joined Dumbledore's Army in the fifth book by Rowling, "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." Goldstein was friends with Terry Booth and Michael Corner, a Ravenclaw who dated Ginny Weasley.