Eight films follow one boy from eleven to seventeen, and they grow up with him — the first is a children’s adventure, the last is a war film. The three Fantastic Beasts pictures go back sixty-five years to 1920s New York and Paris and are aimed at the audience that finished the first eight, not at the one that started them. Release order is the only order that keeps that progression intact. Story order puts the 1920s first, which means opening on the adult film and meeting Dumbledore as a rival before you have met him as a headmaster.