Which 2016 film was the first movie written directly by J.K. Rowling?

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was the first movie written directly by J.K. Rowling.

Released in 2016, the film is set in New York in 1926 and follows Newt Scamander, a British magizoologist whose magical creatures escape from his case. Eddie Redmayne plays Newt, while Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, and Colin Farrell are among the principal cast.

Rowling wrote the screenplay, making it her screenwriting debut. The film expands the wizarding world beyond Harry Potter and introduces the earlier history of Albus Dumbledore and Gellert Grindelwald through its later sequels. Its title comes from a fictional Hogwarts textbook first mentioned in the original Harry Potter books.

The movie is not an adaptation of a conventional narrative novel. Instead, it developed from the fictional textbook Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which Rowling had published as a charity companion book in 2001 under the name Newt Scamander.