Not so long ago, I saw a video listing 10 major fantasy stories where the movie failed. And one of the common factors was – with no big surprise – that a single movie was too short to feature the sprawling worldbuilding such sagas tend to feature.

I guess it doesn’t take much to realize that movies have their limitations. The longest movies are (excluding director’s DVD cuts) typically below three hours or just a bit above. And that length is rarely the case for the first installment in a series.

I’ve been growing up in what was maybe the last golden time of fantasy movies – with popular series like Harry Potter and the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. The popularity of Harry Potter got a lot of people back to reading and several new authors made their name – some as the creators of a single series, others as creators of larger sagas.

And it was that time when the limitations of the movie format became visible. The fifth and sixth Harry Potter movies faced several omissions from the story. The final book was split into two movies just to reduce the amount of cuts. The second and third PotC movies were also part of the same story split in two parts.

After the success of Harry Potter, the movie adaptation of Eragon was likely seen as easy picking to make some decent money – there was interest in the fantasy genre with coming-of-age elements and the book was popular. Yet it became a prime example of a failure.

The book was, on its own, quite long. And the elements omitted from the movie were so many that it pretty much made a decent continuation impossible. I guess the haste to make a movie adaptation was also part of the problem – by the time the movie was released, the third book was barely in the making (it’s possible that the second book wasn’t even complete by the time the work started) so I guess it was hard for the movie makers to know what would be important. And the fans of the book were quite displeased with the cut elements of the story. There are rumors that the saga might be revisited as a TV series…

The same problem could also happen to much shorter books – such as the Mortal Instruments series. The omissions weren’t as noticeable and definitely not as major – but it still fell short of the source material. The book series was, eventually, restarted as TV series, which was a strong hint of where the future of the fantasy genre might lay. A series would give much more space to the worldbuilding and lead to fewer cuts (in the ideal case, no major element would be skipped).

This approach seemed to work well with the Witcher series, though the narrative in this case was quite confusing in the first season and the second season faced criticisms about omitting some of the finer details that made the story different from the typical Western fantasy. However, it might end up facing viewership issues given the fact that most of these streaming services are raising their prices and cutting on the convenience features they once had (such as the lack of ads) while the economy has forced many people to rethink their spending habits. The fracturing of these services might also end up turning more people towards piracy.

And, to mention my last example – aside from cutting story elements, sometimes, the hard question becomes: for what audience is the movie served? A massive amount of story adjustment in hopes of making the movie more accessible to people unfamiliar with the universe, combined with high costs led to the poor results of the Warcraft movie.

And while the creative minds behind the Warcraft franchise haven’t completely given up, it was quite clear that a movie simply can’t work well for a fictional universe of such a size. Even if Warcraft is ever revisited in the form of a TV series, choosing a good starting point will be difficult and it might end up facing similar issues with (lack of) timeline clarity as The Witcher did.

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To wrap it up, it seems that for the typical fantasy stories that feature several books, movies as a visual form fall short. However, live-acted series, especially if heavy on CGI effects, might raise the costs a lot and other forms (such as animation) might not always be fitting. I’m curious to see where this genre will head in the future.

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