Search This Blog

Thursday, October 1, 2015

From Book to Screen (Revisited)


A couple of years ago I posted about fantasy books that were adapted to the screen (see here), and I feel it’s time to say just a little bit more about it. There has been a lot of success with movie adaptations for fantasy novels lately—more than ever before. In the 70’s and 80’s, fantasy was rampant on the screen (both television and movies), but none of them would be as epic and successful as Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (first released in 2001—a month after the first Harry Potter movie). 2001 was like the kick-off year for what would be an avalanche of fantasy movie adaptations (in addition to the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter sequels) with the release of The Chronicles of Narnia, Eragon, Stardust, The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Seventh Son, and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy. However, the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Hobbit movies would outshine them all.

The small screen (television) has been rolling out fantasy adaptations as well, such as: Legend of the Seeker, based on Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series; Merlin, which was loosely based on the King Arthur legend; and the all-popular Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Coming up in January of next year is the release of The Shannara Chronicles, based on Terry Brooks Shannara series. Of course there were and are more fantasy TV shows, but I’m speaking specifically about fantasy literary fiction that was adapted to the screen.

To add on to the big and small screen fantasy fiction adaptations, today’s (October 1ST) announcement of Patrick Rothfuss’ Kingkiller Chronicle series being acquired by Lionsgate for movie, television and video game (read about it here) shows that the fire is still burning hot for fantasy books converting to screen. Of course the Game of Thrones TV show breaking a record at the Emmy Awards (see here) comes to show that fantasy has what it takes to compete in the very competitive market of onscreen entertainment.

So, like the flux of comic book movie and TV mania, fantasy is creating its own waves on the screen, and we need only to sit back and enjoy (hopefully).



No comments:

Post a Comment