[davem]

Yes, but its sad. And it puts a question mark over the future of fantasy films. Yes, the LotR series will continue, & so will the Narnia movies, but fantasy movies generally?

Of course, the problem was that NL bottled out ('got scared'). They may have set out wanting to avoid offending Christians, but they ended up going too far & trying to avoid bothering anyone - & they succeeded: in the end no-one was bothered by the movie. Trouble was not enough people were bothered about the movie.

Anyway, I don't see a sequel to TGC being made. What I do see is a slew of sub LotR movies which just repeat the standard formula of 'band of unlikely heroes must unite to defeat the DARK LORD? blah blah blah'.

What I'm most interested in seeing is the response to Pullman's sequel to HDM, 'The Book of Dust' which is supposed to be out in a couple of years. I've already heard of HDM being removed from some school libraries - can we expect a boycott of the next book?


EDIT

Actually, it brings up a bigger question - should the ideas & concepts that fantasy explores, whether in book or movie form, be restricted? Isn't fantasy, at heart, about asking the question 'What if?' If a fantasy novel or movie can't present a secondary world in which 'God' is not only evil, but actually a fake, then what can it do - what limits do we set on fantasy worlds - because whatever limits we set on fantasy worlds we are actually setting on the human imagination - we're saying 'You are not allowed to imagine 'X'.' - effectively Pullman's point.

It could be argued that those who object to Pullman's work on 'moral' grounds (not pointing at anyone in particular) are actually objecting to fantasy in general, & to the human imagination in particular. After all, in what way is imagining a secondary world in which 'God' is a fake from whom humanity must liberate itself & find its own way forward different from imagining a world in which the sun is green, or in which animals can speak with humans?

(For the record, I still found HDM (the book - haven't seen the movie yet) increasingly dull as it went on (nearly said 'progressed'!!) & found PP's repetitive haranguing just annoying by the end, so I'm not putting this argument forward as praise of PP.