The second movie in the Harry Potter spin-off series Fantastic Beasts will be released in November 2018, Hollywood movie studio Warner Bros said, promising "much more on the horizon" from the Potter franchise.

British author J.K. Rowling will write the script for the second movie as she did for the first and David Yates, who directed the last four "Harry Potter" films, will direct, Warner Bros said in a statement.

The first episode of Fantastic beasts and where to find them movies comes to theatres in November. Photo: fantasticbeasts.com

The movie, yet to be titled, is part of a three-movie deal based on Rowling's book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a prequel to her best-selling Harry Potter books. The first movie, starring Eddie Redmayne, will be released on Nov. 18, 2016.

Redmayne plays Newt Scamander, a "magizoologist" who arrives in New York in 1926 with a case of magical creatures that escape, wreak havoc and face threats from muggles, the non-magical humans in the city.

Ahead of San Diego's Comic-Con event last month, Yates teased that a familiar character from the Harry Potter stories will return in Fantastic Beasts.

"There is a mention of some characters that we know and love from previous movies, but we only talk about them fleetingly," Yates told Reuters.

"In the next movie, part two, we'll get to meet one of them in a significant way. He's much younger than he used to be, but he'll be coming back."

In June, Yates said Rowling already had ideas for the third Fantastic Beasts film and said he relished not having to adapt the new stories from books.

"When we adapted the books, we'd always have to leave out things you hated leaving out because they didn't quite work in the structure of the storytelling for the movie," he said.

"Pottermania" returned with a vengeance in recent weeks, with rave reviews for the London stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and publication of the play script in book form. U.S. and British booksellers say the book is already the best-selling title in a decade.

More than 450 million copies of the seven original Harry Potter books have been sold worldwide in 79 languages. The movie franchise has grossed more than $7 billion worldwide.