“Movies rely on actors, who can be effective, but are limited by their own bodies (even with CGI and special effects) while the theatre in a reader’s head has a cast of thousands.” “Words, which are ambiguous and slippery, have more metaphoric and symbolic power than images, which are concrete and fixed,” Verlyn Flieger, a leading Tolkien scholar who doesn’t care for screen adaptations, told me recently. But if you only consume the screen-adapted versions, you’re not only missing out on the characters and plot lines that were hacked and slashed to fit the story into a reasonable time frame (and reasonable CGI budgets), you’re missing out on the larger worlds the authors created. That’s the long way of saying viewers today have enough sci-fi and fantasy content that they need not read any of the books that inspired it in the first place. Then there is Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings TV series, which is set thousands of years before Tolkien’s main books, that is set to debut in September and currently has two seasons officially announced. Earlier this month, we got the first look at House of the Dragon, HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel that’s set to debut sometime in 2022 ( the teaser has garnered nearly 13 million views in two weeks, an indication that people aren’t exactly over Thrones just yet). Next month, the first season of The Wheel of Time, based on the 14-book series by Robert Jordan, premieres on Amazon Prime Video, and it’s already been renewed for a second. This weekend, Dune, based on the book by Frank Herbert, gets a big-budget redo at the hands of Denis Villeneuve starring golden boy and girl Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. Then, Game of Thrones came along and proved it was worth it for all players, from movie studios to streaming giants, to allocate massive budgets and top talent to the section of your local bookstore filled with swords and spaceships. Tolkien, while certainly considered the father of modern fantasy, is often placed above the label of the genre, and the gigantic financial gamble New Line Cinema made on the movies is not one others were willing to make on lesser writers.

You might be under the impression that the massive critical and commercial success of the Lord of the Rings movies is what propelled fantasy into the mainstream. Martin’s book series A Song of Ice and Fire made people take the adaptation of science-fiction and fantasy seriously.

Just as Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy made people take comic book movies seriously, David Benioff and D.B. While the general consensus is that the legacy of HBO’s Game of Thrones among viewers has been forever tarnished by the final season, its legacy in the world of film and TV is only just beginning to rear its dragon-sized head.

The riddle master trilogy