We Hope He Directs this Harry Potter Spin-Off

We're already so excited for J.K. Rowling's next Potter film, even if it won't feature Harry, Ron and Hermoine. And there's more good news, even if it's a rumor: Alfonso Cuarón MIGHT direct Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which is slated for a 2016 release. (Can we wait that long?)

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them shares the title of one of the beloved Hogwarts textbooks required for First Years that Hermoine Granger no doubt read cover to cover and scolded Ron and Harry for avoiding. J.K. Rowling wrote an edition of the actual book in 2001, penning it as Newt Scamander, the fictitious magical zoologist that will be the star of the new film. The film version will be a trilogy, giving Harry Potter fans something to live for for the next few years, and it will be set in New York City seventy years before Harry receives his letter from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. So why is Cuarón the perfect director for the new film? Even though the rumor that he's "deep in talks" to direct the film is ambiguous and, well, just a rumor from Deadline editor Nikke Finke, we hope it comes to fruition, because Cuarón's first Harry Potter directorial debut was incredible — Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was the darkest and most human of the Harry Potter film series.

Cuarón, who won an Academy Award for directing the cinematic wonder Gravity, brought a sense of reality to the fantastical series with Prisoner of Azkaban. As a diehard Harry Potter fan, I still have gripes with the fact that many of the factual details that were crucial to the plot of book three were omitted from Prisoner, but over the years I have come to appreciate how beautiful an addition it is to the Harry Potter series.

Cuarón's signature visual effects would be an enormous boon if he were to direct Fantastic Beasts, which is set to be more of an adventure film that the Harry Potter series was: Newt will travel across five continents to collect his zoological information for his text, and who better to scale the earth than Cuarón? It's premature to say that it would a visual masterpiece, but after the gorgeous Gravity, that's not far-fetched.

Cuarón also brought out the real humanity of the Harry Potter characters in Prisoner: his direction of Gary Oldman as Sirius Black was emotional, complex and dark, and we want to see him bring that same character development to Fantastic Beasts. Of course, it's going to be a gleeful delight to see Newt Scamander catalog skrewts, scrumps, and hippogriffs, but we want to know the man himself, too. And who better than Cuarón to bring out his inner conflict?

Now the question stands—Who will play Newt Scamander?!