Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore 4K review

Jun 23, 2022- Permalink

Warner Brothers Home Entertainment has released Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore on 4K and I had a chance to review it courtesy of them. Since WB are a fan of legalese, here goes: Though Warner Brothers provided me with a copy of this movie to review, the thoughts and opinions below are mine alone. This third entry in the Fantastic Beasts prequels to the Harry Potter franchise sees Professor Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) enlisting the aid of Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) and a team of wizards and witches to try and stop the dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen) from taking over the wizarding world.

The 2160p HEVC / H.265 encoded native 4K transfer with Dolby Vision and HDR10 is presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. The video presentation has excellent detail and clarity in its facial textures, textiles and environments. The colour palette is full of a lot of grays and other darker colours but where there are brighter colours, they really come alive. The HDR grading helps the variety of muted tones very well. Black levels are generally pretty deep and the dark scenes and shadows maintain their detail. There’s no sign of digital noise or compression artifacts.

On the audio side, the disc comes with a choice of multiple Atmos tracks, which isn’t that common. There are English, German, and Italian Dolby Atmos tracks as well as an English Dolby TrueHD 7.1 track, English and German Descriptive Audio tracks, and English, French, German, Italian and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 tracks. Subtitles are available for English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Cantonese, Danish, Finnish, Korean, Mandarin, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish. The Atmos track is put to good use with various height effects, while the surrounds will put you in the action so well you’ll pick up a wand. Explosions and crashes will rock your subwoofer, while dialogue is clear, centred and well-prioritized.

Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore also comes with a Blu-ray disc and a digital copy code. The bonus materials are located on the Blu-ray disc. There’s a Dumbledore family tree, a look at the character and the actors who have played him, a guessing game with cast and crew, a look at the Hogwarts set through the eyes of the actors, a look at the fantastic beasts, a look at Newt Scamander, a piece on German locations, a quartet of scene examinations, deleted scenes and a promo for the stage production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child that is running in multiple cities.

Studio machinations will decide if this less successful franchise will see more films. The Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets Of Dumbledore 4K comes with very good video and audio presentations and a large selection of extras. Fans of Harry Potter who want to have everything in its universe in their collection will probably be picking this one up.