A torrent of fantasy films is flowing into Hollywood's pipeline. Studios see the gold "Lord of the Rings" hath wrought.
Remember the horse-drawn cart that carried Gandalf the Grey into Hobbiton at the outset of The Fellowship of the Ring?
The wizard had better move over: Hollywood has an army of sword-wielding knights, sage sorcerers, monsters, elves, and Renaissance Faire look-alikes about to jump on the wagon.
It doesn't take an Oxford don to explain why as many as a dozen big-budget fantasies are in the works. The $2.84 billion international take for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and best-picture and director Oscars for the Return of the King - not to mention kabillions in DVD/video sales, merchandising and ancillary rights - have ignited the formerly disparaged dungeons-and-dragons genre.
"What Peter Jackson did was open our eyes to the bigger world you can create," says Rodney Ferrell of Fox 2000, which is adapting the bestselling young-adult novel Eragon to the screen.
"What Lord of the Rings has proved is that [fantasy] can be synonymous with quality drama and storytelling," says Mark Ordesky, the New Line Cinema Productions chief executive officer who presided over the seven-years-in-the-making Tolkien trilogy.
Unlike Ordesky, 40, for whom Labyrinth and Conan the Barbarian were teenage must-sees, today's audiences are seeing their fantasy literature translated into works with artistic cred.
Many projects in the impending onslaught, such as Eragon, are intended as first installments in LOTR-stylefranchises.
Ordesky and New Line have twotrilogies on the fast track: His Dark Materials, based on British author Philip Pullman's adventures of a precocious orphan girl, animal demons, witches, and an armor-clad polar bear, and Inkheart, from German novelist Cornelia Funke, in which another feisty young femme battles characters magical and malevolent.
London playwright Tom Stoppard has scripted the first Dark Materials book, The Golden Compass, and Ordesky is now conferring with director candidates. Production is expected to begin by year's end.
With their kidnik heroes and academic/literary settings, New Line's dueling series fall somewhere between Tolkien's Middle-earth and the world of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter. The third Potter picture, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is set for a June 4 release.
While Ordesky is understandably upbeat about His Dark Materials and Inkheart - and the advances in computer-generated effects that make them possible - not everyone is convinced that "quality drama and storytelling" will survive once the afterglow of The Lord of the Rings has faded.
For all the A-list fantasy projects, there are bound to be pale imitators - elves with the glue visibly oozing from their pointy-ear prosthetics.
Star Wars launched a boom in science-fiction epics, offers Jeffrey Walker, a Hollywood marketing exec who specializes in sci-fi and fantasy. "It was the same after Indiana Jones, with adventure movies. And the same thing after Batman, with superhero movies."
Predictably, Walker says, "there was mixed success."
Viggo Mortensen, the reluctant monarch Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings movies, agrees: "What usually happens with any fad [is] there may be one or two that are halfway decent. But [then] it will just decline until they make such horrible ones that... we'll go into some new genre or fad.
"I'd be surprised if anything will be as good as The Lord of the Rings."
Tell that to the studios. Two weeks ago, Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media announced with great fanfare the coming of The Chronicles of Narnia, an adaptation of C. S. Lewis' seven-book series about a quartet of English schoolkids who step inside a closet and emerge into a realm of witches, elves, dwarves and a Christ-like lion king. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, based on the first volume, begins production this summer in New Zealand. Andrew Adamson, who codirected Shrek, will steer the $100 million-plus production toward a Christmas 2005 release.
In the pre-LOTR days, the rights to Narnia belonged to Hollywood producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. But despite a strong track record - E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit - the pair couldn't find a backer.
"Every single studio in town passed, some of them twice," says Kennedy, who tried to develop the project in the mid-'90s and later reluctantly let go of the property. "Things are all about timing and luck, and this was certainly a very good example of both: bad and bad."
Part of the problem was the film's $116 million budget.
"There hadn't been any movie made for $100 million," recalls the producer, who had director John Boorman on board. And "this wasn't a movie that anybody was willing to break the $100 million barrier for, either: no stars... a children's book."
Fantasy, with its lavish production and effects, is still a big-ticket undertaking.
"The 'ante-up'... isn't in nickel chips," New Line's Ordesky says. "No one's going to sit down at the fantasy table who isn't prepared to spend at least a moderately high, if not high, amount of money."
If there's a plus to that, he says, it's that "a lot of bad-intentioned imitators" will be weeded out.
Eragon, the story of a boy and his dragon (and dwarves, elves, Neanderthal armies, and an evil king), "has elements of Lord of the Rings," says Rodney Ferrell, the Fox 2000 exec. "And that's attractive to us because it makes the movie big" and adds to its blockbuster potential.
Ferrell has the first installment in Christopher Paolini's planned trilogy, written when the home-schooled Montanan was 15, out to screenwriter Peter Bushman, who has worked with Martin Scorsese and Peter Weir. Fox 2000 hopes to have a director within a month or so, and production ("most likely not New Zealand") under way by year's end.
The studio is looking at a Christmas 2005 opening, opposite Disney's Narnia debut.
Set to start shooting this summer, in the Czech Republic, is The Runelords, an $80 million adaptation of the first book in the four-volume series credited to Dave Farland - a pseudonym for David Wolverton, a sci-fi author (Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia) and developer of video games. Wolverton's story deals with a prince who must battle magical and human forces and giant insectlike creatures in order to save Earth.
French-Canadian director Christian Duguay, who has experience with castle sieges and knights on horseback thanks to the TV miniseries Joan of Arc, has been signed to the picture, due out next summer.
"It's really a moral tale," says Wolverton, one of the film's producers. "It addresses, in this fantasy vernacular, what it's like to live in our world."
Wolverton acknowledges the influence of Tolkien on his early career. "I probably started [in this field] because of him," he says. But now, "the only similarity may be [their books'] sort of medieval fantasy settings."
Asked if he worries that others will accuse him of jumping on the Gandalf bandwagon, Wolverton sounds like one who has kept the faith for a long time. "There will be some people who think that," he says, "but I've recognized for years that fantasy was on the cusp, and that [eventually] the audience would be ripe for it."
What remains to be seen is whether the audience will overripen and lose interest when faced with so many offerings. Also in the pipeline are:
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer's wild adventures of a 12-year-old criminal mastermind, described by the author as "Die Hard with fairies." The film is being made by Miramax.
A Princess of Mars, from the classic Edgar Rice Burroughs series (11 books in this one!) that mixes Civil War-era adventure, space travel and exotic monsters and damsels. "After Lord of the Rings, this is probably the last well-known fantasy classic yet to be made," says Spy Kids' Robert Rodriguez, who is attached to the $100 million Paramount project.
Evermere, the first of an envisioned trilogy based on a script by David Goyer (Blade) and James Robinson of DC Comics, about a teenager who is heir to the throne of an alternate universe. Terminator 3 producers Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna are on the case, and Sony Pictures is in on the deal.
Forbidden Warrior, about a beautiful woman with warrior skills who fulfills an ancient prophecy and becomes protector of the world's most powerful book of spells. This one, budgeted at a mere $5.5 million, is in the can - and hails from Cinamour Entertainment, an indie outfit that specializes in horror and soft-core porn.
And finally, there's The Hobbit, Tolkien's prequel to his Rings cycle, which LOTR's Jackson intends to get to sometime after he remakes King Kong.
"There's the challenge," film marketing veteran Walker says, surveying the surfeit of offerings. "It's going to be interesting to see which... strike that same Lord of the Rings chord."
If that's even possible.
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