FANTASY WORLDS WILL KNOW NO BOUNDS
ARE YOU READY FOR THE ‘ASTRAVERSE’?
Unless you’ve been reading this magazine back to front, you’ll know about House of the Dragon by now. The Game of Thrones prequel might be the most eagerly anticipated, but it is by no means the only fantasy or sci-fi mega-project on the way. In fact, such is the barrage of fantasy and sci-fi titles, this autumn’s release slate looks like the cavalry charge at the end of The Return of the King.
Deep breath: there’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; yet another Star Wars spin-off in Andor with Diego Luna; Warwick Davis returning for a sequel series of sorcery-and-wigs epic Willow; there’s Hindi-language Brahmāstra Part One: Shiva, which will launch a brand-new cinematic universe, the “Astraverse”; the third and final series of Philip Pullman adaptation His Dark Materials; Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series; and James Cameron’s mo-cap a-go-go Avatar sequel The Way of Water, which squelches into multiplexes a mere 13 years after the first.
That’s a lot of universes, mythologies and storyworlds competing for your eyeballs (and by no means is this an exhaustive list). To be fair, sticking your consciousness into an escape pod and blasting off into the cosmos for a couple of hours certainly feels like quite a tempting idea at the moment. More than that, though, we’re being invited back into worlds we know — only Brahmāstra is trying to build a story from the ground up — and, since Marvel started knitting its universes together, there’s been a yearning for any story to never really be over, for there to be side-quests and undiscovered nuggets to be found. (Whether it’s comic-loving audiences or IP-flogging studios who are doing all that yearning is another debate.)
And, even if you’re a disinterested villager at the fringes of this clash of titans, there is, at least, a frisson of high-stakes, mega-budget gambling going on here that’s worth tuning in for; The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power reportedly cost a punchy $500m for just the first season. But could this be the acme of our fantasy appetites? Are we about to hanker for some kitchen-sink? Will the lore [titters into fingers] be an ass? Let’s face it — if the world continues in its current form, we’ll take all the unicorns the studios can throw at us (ideally not horn-first). tom nicholson