Okay, look, maybe it’s just me, but who made my fantasy serious?
Genuinely, who is it? I want to have a strong and vehement conversation with them, because if I see one more fantasy story with a budget large enough to fund a small country, I will commit some unspeakable crime that I cannot publish in this newspaper (like sneaking into the Carnegie Mellon steam tunnels or organizing a protest of precisely 25 people with less than two days notice). Because to some extent, fantasy is broken, and I, Eshaan Joshi, critic extraordinaire, have all the tools to fix it.
(The person I am sitting next to while writing this just told me that I’m “like Fix-it Felix.” She still wonders why she’s single.)
Well, okay, as much as I can talk the talk, when it comes to criticizing fantasy, it’s very, very hard to talk about it because fantasy is just so broad. I’m going to focus on one sub-genre: “Sword n’ Sorcery.”
(It was at this point I had to explain to the person I was sitting next to what exactly a “Conan the Barbarian” is. Her first comment was to ask him to put on a bra.)
But Conan, Xena, and the B-movie Sword n’ Sorcery sleaze of the ’70s (look ma, I can alliterate like the best of ’em) were crucial to inventing the foundation of gritty fantasy. It was R-rated, sporting humans physically so far beyond the pale that they were less muscle and sinew and instead steroids and chemicals animated with hard drugs.
They did one thing that was important: They kept the entire genre of Sword n’ Sorcery from taking itself too seriously.
It was hard to justify blowing a few hundred million movies when you weren’t gonna get big actors, you weren’t contracting out the cutting-edge VFX houses, and you could always just shoot on location (and by location, I mean any place that looked vaguely desert-like).
Since it was hard to justify spending money, most of these movies were small affairs, relying on an occasional star-power boost (thanks former Governor of California, Arnie S.), good word of mouth, or TV plays. These were the cult classics you hid under your bed and pretended you’d never heard of in polite company, and it worked!
What happened?
Well, a combination of things, unfortunately. Firstly, TV has made the jump from the small screen to prestige TV. This means that the direct-to-TV industry, which once subsided on syndicated sitcoms, the odd periodical, and the TV-movie, was now missing a lot of those sources of revenue. Think of the last major sitcom that has aired in the previous few years. There isn’t one — at least not one that has made it into the cultural consciousness recently. The big TV is no longer “Friends” (clap-clap-clap-clap-clap) but an eight-episode prestige TV series that takes two years to film, costs about a bajillion dollars, and outsources everything but the marketing to some overworked VFX team. We can’t just go to Nevada and film a bunch of rocks; every movie needs to be “Lord of the Rings.” Every flick and TV show needs to have the mentality, design, and set that gives people the opportunity to franchise everything from the side characters to an extra’s left toenail.
The problem is that fantasy, when taken from B to A to prestige costs a lot of money. “Lord of the Rings” was amazing, but the entirety of the “Lord of the Rings” franchise — all three movies — costs less than “Rings of Power” Season 2. That’s not right, and it’s hurting fantasy as a genre.
We don’t have Conan anymore. We don’t have silly fantastical movies that focus on stories and tales and heroes and monsters, because we just cannot afford them. If fantasy costs an exorbitant amount a flick, then fantasy needs to make money at the box office. And if it needs to make money at the box office, then it has to be marketable. Marketing loves safe flicks and franchising, and marketing hates weird films and goofy cult classics.
It’s a death knell for a genre’s ability to explore and grow when its primary focus is turning large budgets into large projects. It’s why sci-fi is struggling in a world post-“Star Wars” prequels. It’s why prestige TV has killed 22-episode seasons and reruns, and it seems to have gobbled up Sword n’ Sorcery.
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