Only a few years ago, fantasy seemed to be everywhere. Half the books on the best sellers list were fantasy, Hollywood studios were fighting tooth and nail to adapt anything from “The Golden Compass” to “Eragon” on the big screen, the fantasy game “World of Warcraft” was all the rage… It’s weird, but when I was a kid, it honestly felt like the world lived and breathed fantasy, the way they are right now with superheroes. And it was good fantasy, too! Well, at least some of it was. “Lord of the Rings” managed to get every Oscar known to man, “A Song of Ice and Fire” was selling like crazy long before anyone even conceived a TV show, and if I started naming all the amazing fantasy RPGs from the 2000s, we’ll literally be here all day.
And then something changed. I don’t know when it happened or when I started to notice this shift, but all of a sudden, fantasy didn’t seem to be around anymore. I can’t recall the last time I watched a big blockbuster hard fantasy flick, and even big fantasy franchises seem to have dropped that gimmick (“Thor”, the only fantasy superhero on the silver screen, went in a sci-fi direction with his latest movie, and “Final Fantasy” swapped the hard fantasy the series is often associated from for urban fantasy). Honestly, I thought it was just me, that I was just picky or something, but no, the data supports this – currently, as of the time of this writing (early November), there isn’t a single fantasy book on the New York Times’ bestsellers list. And looking over at the movies’ department, the only hard fantasy “swords and sorcery” movie that came out this year was the Guy Ritchie “King Arthur”.
It’s not like fantasy has been completely absent from entertainment. “Game of Thrones” continues to be a gigantic smash hit, even if the show itself has been crap ever since they dropped the political intrigue in favor of big battles in which none of the characters are in actual danger. One of the biggest games of the last few years, “The Witcher 3”, was a fantasy title through and through – and speaking of “The Witcher”, supposedly they’re making a TV show based on the books for Netflix. But honestly? These are the exceptions, not the rule. If I started listing superhero flicks or blockbuster action movies from the last 5 years, we might as well set up a tent. But I’m really struggling when it comes to fantasy. So I suppose the big question that needs to be asked is: Why exactly does this occur? Honestly, I wish I knew. My theory was that in both the US and UK we’re facing some pretty bad times, and people aren’t looking for fantasy escapism at the moment… Except, that theory falls flat on its back when you realize that other forms of escapism (again, like superheroes and, to a certain extent, sci-fi), seem to be flourishing.
The cold, hard truth is that I don’t know why fantasy is in such a drought. Maybe there’s demand for it from people (like me, hello!), but nobody’s really doing much about it. Or maybe people are so afraid that “Game of Thrones” is dominating the market that they’re afraid to try anything different because they know they’ll never come out on top. I don’t know, neither of those ideas seems sound to me. Maybe it’s just that people got sick of fantasy? Perhaps they see nothing new that can be done with the genre, and so they leave it aside, dooming it to go the way of the western? I really hope that’s not the case, but at this point, what else could it be? I’d like to think that, much like how “Iron Man” and “The Dark Knight” in 2008 helped revitalize the superhero genre and bring it into a golden age, we also need just one decent fantasy novel or movie to do the same. But at this point, I can only hope.