# Why Fantasy Movies are Failing - article



## Devor (Aug 27, 2013)

What does everyone think?

Why does live-action fantasy fail at the movies?


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## Steerpike (Aug 27, 2013)

I go with the first explanation - most of them suck.


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## Nihal (Aug 27, 2013)

I would also go with the first and a bit of the second. I might be a bit ignorant there, but I don't see much difference. Studios allow a bad movie to happen, you can't say it's not their fault.

Now, the third explanation is so, wait, what? Then all the games, animations (2d and 3d) that have magic well presented in a visual medium are just hallucinations of my part?


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## Devor (Aug 27, 2013)

It's kind of striking how many of them are failing, though.

I want to say that it's because the special effects cost sets the bar of success higher, but so many of those movies are just below par.


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## Steerpike (Aug 27, 2013)

Yeah, that's the issue I think. No movie that I saw from that list of failed fantasy movies was very good. If anything, they relied too much on special effects at the expense of developing a good story and good characters. Science fiction movies fall into that trap as well.


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## Asterisk (Aug 27, 2013)

It's sad... fantasy movies deserve to succeed. I agree with the first and third explanations. I hate it when magic and/or characters are cheesy.


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## wordwalker (Aug 27, 2013)

I'd say all the explanations have a point. (Yes, including the look of magic. Even superheroes have a human form leaping two buildings for every laser fired, so the effects folks are on more familiar territory. But monsters and magic are pure CGI.)

Devor added one more, cost. A Mortal Instruments "taking in only about $14 million on a $60 million budget" is only a failure because of the second part. If these were locked-room mysteries or other low-cost genres, they'd be hits-- but I'd agree, most of that article's list of movies deserved to _fail_, not to lowball their way to profit. 

I'd also add, that any movie is a massive trimming and summarizing of any novel it's based on, and fantasy usually depends on its "epicness" to give it momentum. No matter how much mythology you try to squeeze in, it's a whole different experience, and only the better filmmakers can summarize that much that well. (Note that the article praised Game of Thrones, on TV-- just a better medium for long-term quality.)

But I think all the problems (except those two, budget and detail) can be tied to one thing: fantasy's still a very *new* genre for Hollywood. They turn out zillions of cheap crime films, rom-coms, and all the rest, but at least they've made those, so there's a lot of "institutional knowledge" on how to do all the pieces of them. (In theory. They can still get anything wrong, it's Hollywood.)

Even sci-fi is more familiar to them, especially since they can treat it like any other gunfight. We say Star Wars was half fantasy and point out the rise of D&D and anime, but for decades what these inspired was Aliens, Terminators, Blade Runners, and so on leading the SF pack-- but only an occasional Ladyhawke.

Hollywood just hasn't done many fantasies, period, not enough per year that get enough attention to counteract the un-learning and muddling that go on when one movie's lessons try to carry over to the next. A solid filmmaker who's been given free rein can pull it together anyway, but only by their own force of will. And, that list of film successes was for the three biggest franchises, so we see books with sheer quality, followings, and/or clout can provide (or bypass) those needs.

We'll see.


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## Philip Overby (Aug 27, 2013)

I get an immediate feeling from a trailer if I think a fantasy movie is worth seeing or not. Very rarely do I see a trailer and say "That looks awesome" and it actually ends up being crap. Fantasy movies need to be visually stimulating first and foremost. If the special effects look bad, then that may be one reason people don't go see it. 

Another thing is that many fantasy movies don't have any kind of engrossing plot or engaging characters. And word of mouth is still one of the main ways people communicate about movies. If your friend says "This movie had some awesome characters" then it may encourage you to go. If your friend says "It was pretty boring really and all the characters were just card-board cut-outs" then you'll probably not go. 

As the article says, it's a lot of hero's journey kind of stuff that's not done in any sort of inventive way. Oh, I'm a wizard? I need to go on an adventure. Oh no, my uncle died. I must train on my own. Travel, travel, travel, fight a giant centipede, dark lord showdown, end, *fart noise.* 

People have seen these kind of movies over and over again. Unless you're making something that has the built-in fanbase (like LotR or Twilight) then it's going to be hard for fantasy movies to overcome this. Countless remakes don't help matters either.


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## SeverinR (Aug 28, 2013)

IMHO:
1. the studios either pick a great script and scrimp on effects, or pour all the money into effects and invest nothing into story.

HP and LOTR invested in good script and good effects. 
Game of Thrones shows a weekly television show can maintain effects and script and still be profitable. 

I think there are too few Fantasy smart movie makers and too many that think they can throw junk out there and make money from fantasy starved simpletons.  
You can't throw chain shirts on people and use laser lights as magic beams and strobe lights to make movies and have some writer want-to-be write a script and expect people to see it.

Last good fantasy movie?
Hobbit? Wasn't as good as I expected, but better then the rest of the junk.

It is sad a television series making 10 episodes a season can make better fantasy then a full spectrum movie.  Granted Game of thrones isn't high in Fantasy right now, but the dragons were realistic, the shadow warrior and ice men were good.


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## Mindfire (Aug 28, 2013)

I don't think the problem is with the genre. I think the people who did those movies were just looking for quick cash-ins. Call it "Next Syndrome". Constantly looking for The Next Harry Potter or The Next Lord of the Rings rather than just making a good adaptation. The result: badly made films that butcher the source material in many cases. The Last Airbender and Percy Jackson being particularly egregious examples of taking great source material and botching it up. Inkheart also really disappointed me because I loved that book and the film adaptation was just lazy. Of course, some films never had a prayer from the beginning. Eragon was... well... Eragon. And the adaptation was less imaginative than the book in every conceivable way. (Think about that for a moment.) And the Golden Compass's sneering anti-Christian vibes probably wouldn't fare too well in America even without executive meddling. 

But I think the author is cherry-picking just a bit. Aside from dismissing three massive movie franchises out of hand, she outright  ignores other successful films that could be called fantasy like Rise of the Guardians, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Brave, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Narnia (which I would consider reasonably successful even though she doesn't). There are probably others I've missed. Fantasy as a genre isn't doomed to fail. But bad/lazy attempts at it definitely are.


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## Feo Takahari (Aug 28, 2013)

Mindfire said:


> But I think the author is cherry-picking just a bit. Aside from dismissing three massive movie franchises out of hand, she outright  ignores other successful films that could be called fantasy like Rise of the Guardians, Kung Fu Panda, How to Train Your Dragon, Brave, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Narnia (which I would consider reasonably successful even though she doesn't).



Note that several of those are _animated_ fantasy. I think filmmakers have pinned down several ways to create believable magic in an animated medium. (Pirates of the Caribbean and Narnia, though, are successful live-action.)


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## Mindfire (Aug 28, 2013)

Feo Takahari said:


> Note that several of those are _animated_ fantasy. I think filmmakers have pinned down several ways to create believable magic in an animated medium. (Pirates of the Caribbean and Narnia, though, are successful live-action.)



Point well taken. But I think the statement that "fantasy isn't doing well at the movies" is at least misleading if not patently false. It's mostly lackluster efforts and slipshod adaptations that are failing. When a good fantasy movie comes out, it tends to do rather well, just like any other genre. It's not as if a bunch of great fantasy movies came out and still flopped. The movies listed as unsuccessful generally _deserved_ to be unsuccessful.


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## Steerpike (Aug 28, 2013)

Yeah, bad movies are just bad. The Golden Compass, which some people liked well enough, was weak overall in my view. I don't think antichristian elements entered into it though. There is plenty of audience for it, regardless, and the books did well in the U.S. The movie just wasn't very good.


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## Nihal (Aug 28, 2013)

The Golden Compass was a big disappointment. I couldn't understand why they toned down many scenes to the point of changing the story–including the ending–but kept a bloody flying jaw. Just... wtf.

"Hey, it's a movie for children, but it can be badass too, I swear! Here, take this jaw right in the face and shut up!"


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## Steerpike (Aug 28, 2013)

Nihal said:


> The Golden Compass was a big disappointment. I couldn't understand why they toned down many scenes to the point of changing the story—including the ending—but kept a bloody flying jaw. Just... wtf.
> 
> "Hey, it's a movie for children, but it can be badass too, I swear! Here, take this jaw right in the face and shut up!"



Yeah, it wasn't well done. And the theological issues don't really come into play significantly until the third book anyway (and what there was of them in the first book were mostly absent from the film, as I recall).

The filmmakers just screwed it up. If they'd been more faithful to the books and tried to build the characters and stories, it probably would have done better.


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## wordwalker (Aug 28, 2013)

But the question is, how _likely_ is it that non-animated fantasy will get mangled, and why? The odds do look bad.


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## Steerpike (Aug 28, 2013)

wordwalker said:


> But the question is, how _likely_ is it that non-animated fantasy will get mangled, and why? The odds do look bad.



You need a screenwriter and director who will be faithful to the source material I guess. They like to put their own spin on things.


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## Nihal (Aug 28, 2013)

...and you must *not* believe that casting famous actors and throwing in a bunch of money for CGI will translate into instant success.


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## Mindfire (Aug 28, 2013)

wordwalker said:


> But the question is, how _likely_ is it that non-animated fantasy will get mangled, and why? The odds do look bad.



The odds look about 50/50 to me. That's not so bad.


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## CupofJoe (Aug 29, 2013)

Steerpike said:


> You need a screenwriter and director who will be faithful to the source material I guess. They like to put their own spin on things.


But not slavishly faithful if they are adapting from other media. Films and Books are different mediums and need to be treated differently. As an example, for me the book "1984" is very good, but the films of it have been poor. "Brazil" gets the tone and feel of "1984" right for me.


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## Guy (Aug 29, 2013)

Steerpike said:


> You need a screenwriter and director who will be faithful to the source material I guess. They like to put their own spin on things.


Yep. The further away the movie gets from the book it originated from, the worse the movie is. Almost always. If the book did well enough to get Hollywood's attention, the author must have done something right. Yet when these directors get their hands on it they feel the need to screw around with a winning formula and end up butchering the story.


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## Guy (Aug 29, 2013)

> ...and you must not believe that casting famous actors and throwing in a bunch of money for CGI will translate into instant success.


Indeed. Of course, fantasy isn't the only genre with that problem.


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## rhd (Aug 29, 2013)

Good CGI doesn't seduce me anymore. I loved the Cloud Atlas movie but the make-up was so damn bad and it reeked of the Matrix films...okay, may be I didn't like it that much, but it made me want to read the book and I thought it was a great book.

I don't know what I'm trying to say, but I just wish Hollywood would stop butchering sci-fi and fantasy stories. I hate I am Legend, I thought it was terrible sci-fi horror, I hated I Am Robot, also so much self-indulgent machismo. I wish Will Smith would lay off sci-fi or at least stop making it all about him. I ffw most of Oblivion because the human angle stuff was boringly overdone. I mean I'd pass all that and watch Minority Report again on cable, and I rarely watch a movie more than once these days. I want good sci-fi movies back!!! I want to go to the theatre and enjoy both good CGI and a good story, I know most Hollywood actors are good, it's just the material that needs improvement. And there's years and years of great sci-fi/fantasy raw material out there, they just need to find it.


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## SeverinR (Aug 29, 2013)

SeverinR said:


> IMHO:
> 1. the studios either pick a great script and scrimp on effects, or pour all the money into effects and invest nothing into story.
> 
> HP and LOTR invested in good script and good effects.
> ...



I did forget to mention the third problem.  Actors.
They need good effects, good script and semi-believable actors.  Scrimp on any of these and the movie won't do as well as it can.
Three legged stool, cut one short and the movie will fall.


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## rhd (Aug 29, 2013)

rhd said:


> I hated I Am Robot,



Sorry I meant I, Robot.


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## Ophiucha (Aug 30, 2013)

One thing I was discussing with a friend earlier: they don't make these movies until there is some bigger trend they can tag onto, and that doesn't necessarily translate into cinematic success. We were discussing this more in regards to the YA fantasy trend - _The Host_, _Beautiful Creatures_, and _City of Bones_ for 2013 - but I think a lot of it applies to these.

Unless a book has some serious hype to it, like _Harry Potter_ or _Twilight_, it takes studios years to get around to actually making it into a movie. And those fandoms, while not gone, just aren't as hyped anymore. _Spiderwick Chronicles_ was an okay film, and I liked the books well enough, but the movie came out _four years_ after the series ended. The peak of the _City of Bones_ hype was back when I was in high school - 2007 to 2009 - which is incidentally when the (original) series was being published. It's been _four years_. Who cares anymore?

_Eragon_ was three years from the first book, which was about the only book anyone liked. Even the fans of _Eldest_ had a full year to die down their excitement. There is a _Seventh Son_ movie coming out in January or something, which is based on a series of kid's books that started in like 2004. Those kids are in high school now, and probably are not going to fill theatres.

There are definitely a lot of factors, not the least of which being that none of these are as popular as something like Harry Potter or Superman were before their films, but if studios stopped making films 4-10 years after anyone who would have cared has long since stopped caring, it might do a bit better. I mean, _The Golden Compass_ wasn't even that bad a film, but it came out _12 years_ after the book did! The kids who read that were in graduate school by then, for goodness' sake.


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## wordwalker (Aug 31, 2013)

I think this is more the final blow to an already doomed film.

A book's actual readership means only so much to a movie. A movie needs _millions_ of viewers to succeed (especially with CGI costs), and book crowds aren't as large a share of that as we'd like, although it is hard to get even a full share of that since it's hard to make a deal and a film soon after a book (and we can probably point to a few that were, where the movie suffered). 

So a movie has a chance to make its own buzz (it's a !!!! movie!), but it pretty much has to. I guess it's only when the film is good and probably also the books are big that it's able to push through all this-- good buzz, more fandom to draw on and also attract better filmmakers, and probably the book success also means more books (or Tolkienian loyalty) that keeps the readership fresh anyway. A bad movie made about a flash in the pan is just a bad movie.

Here's an interesting question: can anyone name a decent post-LOTR fantasy movie --let's call it one "most fans respected" to keep this from getting too personal-- that didn't succeed, and was it because of lack of studio support or other issues? Are failures like that more or less likely than in other genres, and why?


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## Ophiucha (Aug 31, 2013)

You definitely need more than the readers, but often times it is the readers who create the hype that gets everyone else to go see it. Certainly, there were many more people who saw the _Harry Potter_ films than who read the books, but it was all the hype surrounding the books that got people interested in the movies. I think if you hit any of these films at a time when it's got a sequel on the NYT Bestseller's List and enough people still care about it to try and drag their non-reader friends to see it, you could _at least_ break even on it. Instead, you get _City of Bones_, which will be lucky to make back half of what they spent.



			
				wordwalker said:
			
		

> Can anyone name a decent post-LOTR fantasy movie --let's call it one "most fans respected" to keep this from getting too personal-- that didn't succeed, and was it because of lack of studio support or other issues? Are failures like that more or less likely than in other genres, and why?



Hmm, the closest bomb I can think of is _City of Ember_, which wasn't poorly received by fans but wasn't really respected either. Probably deserved more than it made, particularly since most of the major flaws of the film were also flaws of the novel. And it had Bill Murray as the villain. Marketing was probably an issue, since I'm not sure I _ever _saw a trailer for it and only knew of it because I was a fan of the first book and it was mentioned in some thread on Gaia Online (that's where I hung out in 2008; I was like 16), but the rest of the series was only 'okay' so I admit even I didn't go see it in theatres. I don't know. I think it deserved to make it's money back. The effects and sets were nice, the actors were all pretty good.

I don't know if fantasy in particular is targeted, but I think book-movie adaptations are sometimes handled a bit lazily. Studios seem to think that _any_ book can bring in an audience on name recognition alone, and they sometimes get pretty lazy with the script. They do this remarkable thing where they seem to assume the audience has read the book, but also never bothered to read it themselves.


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## Devor (Sep 2, 2013)

Mindfire said:


> Point well taken. But I think the statement that "fantasy isn't doing well at the movies" is at least misleading if not patently false. It's mostly lackluster efforts and slipshod adaptations that are failing. When a good fantasy movie comes out, it tends to do rather well, just like any other genre. It's not as if a bunch of great fantasy movies came out and still flopped. The movies listed as unsuccessful generally _deserved_ to be unsuccessful.



I think that only shifts the conversation a little bit - maybe not why do so many fail, but why do they make so many bad ones?

For those who are mentioning the visual effects . . . . one thing that sometimes happens in big projects is that they get to a point where they're almost finished, only to have the "higher-ups" lose faith in the project and skimp at the end.  "Skimp at the end" in a fantasy movie would mean going cheap on some of the visual effects.  Is that maybe what's happening?


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## Mindfire (Sep 3, 2013)

Devor said:


> I think that only shifts the conversation a little bit - maybe not why do so many fail, but why do they make so many bad ones?
> 
> For those who are mentioning the visual effects . . . . one thing that sometimes happens in big projects is that they get to a point where they're almost finished, only to have the "higher-ups" lose faith in the project and skimp at the end.  "Skimp at the end" in a fantasy movie would mean going cheap on some of the visual effects.  Is that maybe what's happening?



When I watched The Last Airbender, it definitely looked like that could have happened. Some bending effects were conspicuous by their absence (90% of the training scenes) and others were just toned down to the point of being pitiful (80% of the bending fights) or hilarious (the now infamous "pebble dance"). Of course, that movie had other problems, like the script for starters, but that's no excuse to scrimp on your effects. Heck, if Transformers 2 is any indication, the worse your script is, the _more_ money you should dump into effects.


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## kayd_mon (Sep 3, 2013)

The Transformer movies had scripts? 

I can't guess why there a so many bad fantasy movies. I don't understand why studios would spend so much on a project without ensuring its quality. But there are bad movies in any genre. The core problems rest with the scriptwriters and the actors, then the directors and the producers, and then the special effects crew, I think. You don't need awesome effects to make good movies (TV shows often have bad effects and we still like them), but you do need good dialogue and good actors to deliver it.


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