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.
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