It’s hard to believe it’s already been 3 years since The Lord Of The Rings: The Return of the King was in theaters. To this day I still call it the overall single greatest achievement in the art of filmmaking. Many disagree, and that’s ok, but to me when you look at all aspects of modern filmmaking, all the different pieces that goes into it… nothing scores higher in more of those areas than Return of the King did.
So along came the Oscars, and now no film is history has more awards… ROTK won 11 Oscars that night… winning in every single category it was nominated for. I was beside myself with joy since a lot of pundits said the Academy wouldn’t actually honor a fantasy film. They were wrong. REALLY wrong.
But then, after all the gold, a new popular saying started to emerge over the following weeks. The buzz was now that fantasy films would make a HUGE resurgence and that all the studios would start working hard to develop tentpole fantasy genre films. Film geeks who are fans of fantasy (like myself) were all looking forward now to what the future would bring. Surely there were be a massive upswing in Sci-Fi and in particular FANTASY films going into production right? But there was a problem…
Many people suggested that the massive success of ROTK would OPEN THE DOOR to the fantasy genre for studios. Seems to make sense right? The problem for fantasy, is that ROTK was a little TOO SUCCESSFUL. ROTK didn’t swing the door open for fantasy… it slammed the door shut.
I remember this discussion on The Audio Edition once where I asked the question: “Was Return of the King so successful that now studios may shy away from making more fantasy films out of fear of it being compared to Return of the King, or even worse, that the general movie going public may just see the new movies as Lord of the Rings rip offs?”
So here we are now… nearly 3 years later… and the great resurgence of the fantasy genre never materialized. Yes, there was Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and while I thought it was a fantastic film, it was almost more “fairy tale” than fantasy (yes yes yes, I know I’m playing with semantics here, but I think it’s a valid observation). But even if we concede Narnia as a true fantasy film, then that only really gives us 1 film in 3 years. Hardly the great resurgence many people predicted.
So now here we are, approaching the end of 2006 and a great looking film, Eragon, is almost set to be released (December 15th in North America). And sure enough, as good as the film looks, many people are already jumping on the “It’s a LOTR rip off” bandwagon. A bandwagon that is really based on nothing but the fact that the film is in the same genre as Lord of the Rings. That’s it.
It’s like saying “The 40 Year Old Virgin is a rip of off Animal House because they’re both comedies”.
I have not read Eragon, but those I know what have read both Eragon and LOTR assure me they are quite different stories… but they are indeed the same genre, and sadly, it looks like the great success of Return of the King hasn’t opened the doors for the genre… it, unintentionally, has taken sole possession of it to the exclusion of all others.
Lets hope the next 3 years will see a change in that.
