When thinking about big-name movie or TV franchises within the fantasy genre, it is hard to look past the big names such as “The Lord of the Rings” or “Game of Thrones.” In recent years, we have seen streaming services such as Netflix attempt to adapt their own tellings of modern fantasy stories, as seen with their adaptations of Andrzej Sapkowski’s (“The Tower of Fools”) “The Witcher,” and Leigh Bardugo’s (“Six of Crows”) “Shadow and Bone.” Both of which have varying results in terms of success.
Amazon Prime Video is the latest streaming service to try their hand at adapting another big-name fantasy property in the form of Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” series. But what separates “The Wheel of Time” from other newer fantasy series is the overall weight within the wider fantasy community it brings with it. It is regarded as one of the greatest fantasy stories of all time with over 90 million copies sold worldwide. For reference, the “Game of Thrones” books sold just over 11 million copies before it was adapted to TV.
Scheduled to be released on Nov. 19, the show will follow the path of the novels in the form of a coming-of-age story centered around a group of young adults from a rural farming village who are unexpectedly thrusted into a grandiose adventure spanning multiple countries and continents in order to protect the ones they love. Our protagonists eventually come to deal with many other darker, fantastical elements in the form of grotesque monsters hunting them at every turn, a Dark God seeking to remake the world in his own image and the eventual revelation that one of them is a prophesied chosen one destined to save the world, or maybe destroy it trying.
If that sounded like generic fantasy mumbo-jumbo to you, then you would be correct. Jordan, even said himself in multiple interviews that he set out to tell a generic Lord of the Rings-style story in a more “realistic setting” and took a lot of his inspiration from the aforementioned epic fantasy series. But what Jordan ends up doing is quickly turning the story on its head and subverts a lot of the expectations you would have after your first time picking up the book. It manages to capture the incredible magic and scope of the world that comes with “The Lord of the Rings,” while also managing to bring in the complex characters and political maneuvering we see in series such as “Game of Thrones.”
The characters are flawed as people are. People are greedy; they make bad and often sometimes horrifying decisions that often exploit others for their own personal gain. Things are not as simple as “the good guys team up to defeat the bad guys.” There are many different factions at play and there are consequences for people’s actions. Jordan manages to put his own spin on this world even further in the form of his complex yet incredible magic, extremely detailed and well-realized cultures, and so much more to discover for yourself.
On top of all this, Amazon is reportedly putting close to $91 million into the first season of the show, which just surpasses the final season of “Game of Thrones” as the most expensive season of TV in history ($90 million). The cast and crew are full of big-names and the few teaser trailers released for the show thus far have already been generating a lot of buzz.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, be sure to check out Amazon Prime’s The Wheel of Time, premiering on Nov. 19.
Image from Amazon Prime Video via YouTube
