There was bad news on Friday for Batman and Superman fans, but even worse news for Harry Potter fans.

On Friday night Warner Bros. announced that their upcoming Man of Steel sequel pitting Batman versus Superman has been pushed from July 2015 to May 2016. The studio says the delay is so director Zack Snyder and company can “realize fully their vision, given the complex visual nature of the story.”

That’s a completely understandable excuse, not to mention the fact that 2015 is already looking like a very crowded year of cinema.

But where there’s good news, there’s also bad: I’m afraid this means that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter spinoff film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them won’t hit theaters until 2017 at the earliest.

Warner Bros. has regularly used the Harry Potter film series as a “tent-pole,” meaning it holds up and balances the studio’s box office performance in any given year. Of the eight wizarding movies, half of them opened in the summer while the other half opened in November.

This Fantastic Beasts spinoff series is ultimately in the works for Warner Bros.’ bottom line (though Rowling is very passionate about the project), and that means the film needs to be placed in a year where the studio wants to see a box office boost.

In other words, they’ll have to put Fantastic Beasts in a year where there isn’t another tent-pole like Batman. So, I believe the earliest we’re going to see this movie is 2017.

It’s not just Batman that may push Fantastic Beasts into 2017 or beyond. We still don’t know if Rowling has finished the script, and once that is finished WB will want to look it over and possibly hire another screenwriter to fine tune it. They’ll want to be as satisfied with it as possible to ensure that it can launch a major new series. Then we’ll have to get into finding a director, casting, etc.

Though I’ve been saying since September that we could see Newt Scamander in theaters as early as 2016, I now think we’ll have to wait until 2017 or beyond.