First, The Last Airbender gets savaged by the reviewers, so even if it draws in ~$70 million this weekend, it probably won’t have much staying power. Dawn Treader will be missing half of the kids from the first two movies (yes, they weren’t in the novel, and no, the actors in question aren’t kids anymore), and may be a couple of years beyond its sell date (it almost wasn’t made in the first place). The last few fantasy-tinged releases from the past year or so didn’t seem to do well or last long in the public consciousness. [I’m not sure if the *Twilight* franchise qualifies as fantasy or not] I’m not sure what we’ll be getting with the Conan film (the temptation will be very strong to dumb it down-he is just a big dumb barbarian with a huge sword, after all-and the lead is a virtual unknown). Even The Hobbit has been beset by various issues & delays, which isn’t exactly encouraging. If these films bomb, it may be that the era of the big fantasy epic will be over.
Of course, it may not even have been any sort of Golden Age in the first place (hence the quotes in my title). After the LOTR movies wrapped with ROTK, what franchise managed to successfully take up the mantle and run with it? I’ve already mentioned Narnia, and that series seemed more like a kid’s franchise than anything really compelling from an adult standpoint. We’ve seen the likes of His Dark Materials and Eragon crash and burn. No studio seems interested in pushing any hardcore adult fantasy (and I don’t mean pron you pervs! ) with significant thematic depth-c.f. the Elric movie is now back in Development Hell. To the studios it does seem like they consider such fare to be automatically children’s fare, or teen fodder at best. Hence the endless promise that the LOTR films represented I don’t think has come close to being fulfilled by anything/anyone.
Imho, this actually happened in the late 90’s, with TV shows like Hercules, Xena, Mortal Kombat: The TV Series, Buffy, Angel, etc. etc. etc. I would say it ended when Buffy ended, and the death throes were the final seasons of Lost and Heroes.
Don’t worry, it should cycle through again. Imho, the way you mark these types of things are multi-season TV shows. It’s so hard to tell with movies since they all copy each other. If movie of genre X makes enough money, the next year there’s 20 of them. The next age, imho, will be 3D…whether it will be “golden” or not remains to be seen.
I think right now, we’re in the middle of the Silver or Golden Age of the Vampire.
I’ll go with “no real Golden Age”, either.
There were plenty of fantasy films before Jackson’s LOTR trilogym, and before CGI. There was a blossoming of science fiction and fantasy in the 1980s (that arguably began in the mid-1970s, starting about with Logan’s Run and getting an ENORMOUS boost from Star Wars). I recall 1982 being a high point, with a slew of big-budget movies that included [iE.T.*, Poltergeist, and Bladerunner.it continued on to the end of the eighties, and not even a lackluster Labyrinth nor an awful Howard the Duck could kill it off (despite predictions that they might).
The run continued into the 1990s, and I’m sure it would have even if CGI hadn’t breathed new life into fantasy and SF “real life” movies and fully animated features.
similarly, I don’t think a few poorly-performing films will kill off any genre.
I’ll vote for no Golden Age. There are great fantasy films going back to the silents, with hallmarks like King Kong and the Wizard of Oz along the way. There were a number of good horror genre films plus sci-fi and SF. Having worked in the CG industry, I find most of these films to be showcases for CG technology instead of good films. The Golden Age, hopefully still awaits.
I’d say the previous cycle of fantasy films was in the 80s: Labyrinth, Princess Bride, Dark Crystal, Willow, Legend, The Neverending Story (the first part anyway)… At least those were the ones I grew up with.
I’ll go with “no golden age” and I dont think the era is ending … I believe “Clash of the Titans” did very, very well at the box office … Release the Kraken!
What I found amusing was how so-called “experts” predicted (right up until the opening weekend) that Fellowship of the Ring couldn’t possibly do well, because no fantasy movie had ever done well. Wizard of Oz? That doesn’t count; that’s a classic, not fantasy. The first Harry Potter movie? That doesn’t count; it’s a kid’s movie, not fantasy. The Princess Bride? That’s action, not fantasy. And on and on.
But seriously, it’s really hard to argue that there was some sort of “Golden Age” of fantasy movies, and yet that Oz wasn’t part of it. I mean, we’re talking about one of the most successful movies of all time, here, of any genre.
Avatar is the most successful movie of all time. It is fantasy. (What else? Science fiction? Only because sf is a subset of fantasy. Avatar is about as sf as Robin Hood.) Twilight is vampires and werewolves: what could it possibly be but fantasy? Twilight total: $1.2 billion world-wide.) It made $68 million on a Wednesday! Alice in Wonderland is the classic fantasy of all. It made over a billion total. Iron Man ($600 mil total) and the rest of the superhero movies are fantasy. Ka-ching. Sherlock Holmes[!] had a near fantasy plot. Shrek is pure fantasy and I’d certainly argue that talking, living toys are as well so add on the Toy Story movies. That’s seven more, each at $300 mil U.S. gross plus a gazillion or several overseas. Prince of Persia was a “failure” with a world-wide gross of more than $300 mil so far.
And on, and on, and on, and on.
The only way you can argue that this isn’t the best box office period of all time for fantasy movies is to insist that fantasy has one meaning and one meaning only, and that’s LotR pseudo-medieval quest fantasy. People do seem to argue that, but I can’t take that seriously.
What I want is some fantasy movies that aren’t based on children’s book series, superhero comics, video games, or are remakes. Nobody seems brave enough to try original fantasy stories at the moment, and that’s what is upsetting the run of successes.
And of course the Harry Potter film series has grossed so far over five billion dollars. Even if the total by the end of the series is only six billion, that’s still an average of 750 million each movie. (And I think the phenomenal success of the Harry Potter book and film series is the biggest reason that all of these other book and movie series were attempted; they’re looking for something to match it.)
Based on a book…the changes to which INFURIATED one of my friends, who’s a fan of it. (Didn’t really bother the author (Diana Wynne Jones), who said that was ‘as it should be’. The author of Kiki’s Delivery Service, Eiko Kadano, was rather less enthused about the changes to her book - though Miyazaki managed to talk her down.)
(Er…presuming you’re referring to the conversation between Guanolad and Little Nemo…if it’s to the OP itself, feel free to ignore…)
This problem isn’t limited to fantasy movies, it’s been a common complaint for several years now that Hollywood keeps churning out remakes, sequels, and book/TV/comic/game to movie adaptations. The theater closest to me is currently showing eight movies, three of which are sequels (four if you count Get Him to the Greek as a sequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall), one TV adaptation (A-Team), one comic strip adaptation (Marmaduke), and one adaptation of a familiar legend (Robin Hood). If I wanted to go see a movie that actually centered around original characters I’d have to see Letters to Juliet (which looks pretty bad to me), and even that trades on the familiarity of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
) with significant thematic depth-c.f. the Elric movie is now back in Development Hell. To the studios it does seem like they consider such fare to be automatically children’s fare, or teen fodder at best. Hence the endless promise that the LOTR films represented I don’t think has come close to being fulfilled by anything/anyone.