Why has the success of Peter Jackson's LOTR and Hobbit series not led to more Hollywood fantasy franchises?
Because generally speaking, the traditional fantasy genre just isn’t as popular as more mainstream genres such as action, drama, comedy etc. Or, there just aren’t enough great fantasy books out there to adapt to movies.To be successful a fantasy movie has to be extremely good, in terms of both story and adaptation. The Lord of The Rings is often voted as the best book ever - not just fantasy books, but among all books.Take The Golden Compass for example, based on The Northern Lights, the first of Philip Pullman’s highly regarded fantasy books. The movie was a very well made adaptation of the book, a great first act of the trilogy, I actually thought it was better than the book in a lot of ways.So why did it flop commercially? Probably because nobody knew what it was, a lot of movie goers don’t read books, let alone fantasy books. Have you seen it? Maybe, maybe not.When Hollywood studios see something as good as The Golden Compass flop, they will be reluctant to take risks.There is hope though. Game of Thrones has proven that fantasy can be acceptable to the masses if you mix other genres with it, and spice it up with some edgy themes such as sex and violence. It also helps of course that you have very strong characters and stick to familiar themes, which is what the original Star Wars movie did. Not to mention Harry Potter.If you want to include science fiction in this conversation, The Expanse (great books) are being adapted on the Syfy channel and I hope there is an announcement one day to adapt Peter Hamilton’s fantastic Commonwealth Trilogy books.