J.K. Rowling was credited as the screenwriter of the 2016 film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
The film was her screenwriting debut and expanded the wizarding world beyond Harry Potter. Its central character is Newt Scamander, a British magizoologist who arrives in New York in 1926 with a case containing magical creatures. Eddie Redmayne played Newt in the film.
The title comes from a fictional Hogwarts textbook that Rowling had previously published as a charity tie-in book in 2001. That short companion volume is presented as a work by Newt Scamander, but the film is a new prequel story rather than a direct adaptation of the textbook’s entries.
The film began a planned series of prequel stories and was followed by Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018 and Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore in 2022. Rowling’s credit is as J.K. Rowling, not her crime-fiction pseudonym Robert Galbraith.