Alfonso Cuaron Turns Down 'Harry Potter' Spinoff 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them'

Fans of the Harry Potter franchise were ecstatic when it looked as if Oscar winning director Alfonso Cuaron, who directed the popular Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, would return to the franchise for Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. But sadly it seems he's had a change of heart and won't be returning to the Wizarding World after all. Cuaron tells the Global Post...

Cuaron: "I have a lot of love for that universe, and I tremendously admire J.K. Rowling, but today, for the present, projects based around lots of visual effects don't attract me. I'm coming out of a five-year process of doing visual effects and now I sort of want to clean my palate of that a little bit."

And that makes a certain degree of sense after Cuaron directed Gravity, a film that required incredible amounts of technological precision and heavy visual effects work. There probably won't be too many people complaining if he returns to the smaller, character-driven work from earlier in his career. So the search is on for another to direct J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which is to open on November 18th 2016