It cannot be overstated what a landmark set of films The Lord of the Rings were. At the time they were a phenomenon, beloved by audiences and critics alike. To this day I’d argue that the films hold up quite well. You can tell the love and care that was put into every moment of them, and the enthusiasm of the cast and crew for the product. It really feels like a set of films that someone really wanted to make, a sad rarity these days. One would think that The Lord of the Rings would usher in a new age of similar fantasy films, and yet, I’m not sure anything has even come remotely close. The question is then – what happened?

I should start by saying that the post-Lord of the Rings fantasy film landscape is not entirely barren. Guillermo del Toro has bravely been keeping the fantasy spirit alive through his work, and there have been many sleeper classics such as 2007’s Stardust. But none of them have won the critical and popular acclaim as Lord of the Rings – with the exception, perhaps, of the contemporary Harry Potter series. In fact, if we count by sheer money earned, Harry Potter outstripped Lord of the Rings, its 8 films raking in roughly 8 billion dollars, neatly comparable to the Lord of the Rings raking in 3 billion dollars for 3 films. I don’t wish to be overly critical of the Harry Potter films (and will leave books and author right out of this discussion), but I can’t help but wonder if it was Harry Potter that had more of a part in directing the future of fantasy films then Lord of the Rings – and if the lessons learned from it were all beneficial ones. After all, while Harry Potter started at about roughly the same time as Lord of the Rings, it ended nearly a decade later.

While there are many who will decry the suggestion that Harry Potter is “just for children”, I can’t help but suspect that it was a major impact on the emergence afterward of a storm of “young adult” oriented fantasy films. While I’m sure that these all had their fans at the time, very few of them seemed to have had the staying power of Harry Potter. Trying to age target so aggressively also did little to help the longevity of these followers in the public consciousness. I’m not sure that anyone is really going to fondly look back on the Percy Jackson series. And absolutely no one remembers Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

These series all hold the similarity with Harry Potter in that they take place adjacent to “reality”, with characters slowly learning about a “hidden” fantasy world. This kind of fantasy is of course as valid as any other, but I have to wonder if it made producers wary about dropping people into a truly and completely different world such as in Lord of the Rings. This effect may not have been a significantly negative one, but I must ask if it was perhaps a more limiting one, restricting the number of screenplays that actually made it to production.

Harry Potter also taught that bigger was better. Three movies making a billion dollars each is good, but what about eight movies making a billion dollars each? What about more? Unfortunately, this may be the most major reason why Lord of the Rings has had some of its impact stolen; namely, the blatant attempt to copy Harry Potter’s franchise size by releasing the severely lackluster and uninspired Hobbit trilogy, which featured a single slim book scraped over too much screen time (ironically, The Hobbit should have been the one film in this era to try for a more whimsical, innocent tone) and may have actually undid all the work that Lord of the Rings had begun. Harry Potter went even further with spinoff films, and other genres altogether took the idea to new heights, finally crystallizing in the total domination of Disney with its multiple money printing franchises. While there is nothing inherently wrong with these films on their own, there has arisen the unspoken idea that the new is obsolete when the retread is now the cutting edge. In this paradigm, there is little room for the sort of evolution I discussed in the first half of this piece.

Whether it was the success of Harry Potter, the failure of The Hobbit, or other factors, the fantasy landscape after Lord of the Rings seemed to be defined by this skew into the morass of young adult adaptations – and then, the reaction to it. The next landmark in the genre on screen was certainly Game of Thrones, which was as much a pseudo-historical drama as it was a fantasy work. The choice of a work noted for gratuitous sex and violence, adhering to “gritty” sensibilities, may have been reactionary, but it was surely a winning formula, Game of Thrones arguably being as big a phenomenon as Lord of the Rings despite never hitting the big screen. It would seem that the muted impact of Lord of the Rings wouldn’t matter – here could be the real start of a fantasy renaissance.

And yet I think that the failure of the fantasy genre to have a major cultural impact after Lord of the Rings is connected to a dirty secret behind Game of Thrones’ ultimate fate of irrelevancy. While adhering to the story laid out by book writer George RR Martin, the series flourished. And yet the writers who took over in finishing the story, Benioff and Weiss, took an attitude that seemed to suggest that they viewed the fantasy genre in the same way that it had been seen before Lord of the Rings, claiming that they did not want to appeal to “(fantasy) fans” but to “mothers, NFL Players…”. The unspoken assumption here is that to be a fan of fantasy is to be a strange exception. In short, fantasy is not viewed within Hollywood as having had its “arrival” yet. But how could Game of Thrones ever been that homecoming, I wonder, if it was being designed by its writers to reject its very nature?

The money Game of Thrones made still has many seeking to be its successor, to various levels of success. Given the directional choices, I think that maybe those Game of Thrones successor dollars will be better found in historical dramas than in works that delve deeper into the fantasy genre. But honestly, the phrase “The Next Game of Thrones!” was pretty ridiculous when the show was well-liked, suggesting that success comes through emulation. After the finale of Game of Thrones, the phrase becomes hilarious.

In the end, my point here has to chart how odd the evolution of the fantasy genre in film and television has been as a cultural force when compared to other genres, with consistent “false starts”, lapses into obscurity, and constant chasing of its own tail. This does not mean there have not been many great fantasy films and shows, and nor that there will not continue to be many in the future. Indeed, out of North America, the genre may have very different paths. Europe always seems to have room in its heart for the genre, and China’s filmmaking industry seems to have dived into the concept with full gusto when they discovered the special magic of awful CGI. In Japan… well, let’s not talk about the fantasy genre in Japan until the isekai craze is well and truly buried.

As for me, I’m quite happy with the situation. I don’t get upset by a bad adaptation of something I enjoyed, as I consider the adaptation a work that stands on its own. At the same time, I don’t really feel the necessity of an adaptation as a “validation” as some seem to need. No matter what Hollywood is doing at any given moment, there is a rich and expansive world of fantasy literature that is never going away. And maybe, sometimes, things are better left to the imagination anyway.