Fantasy is having a moment again. Blame it on House of the Dragon killing off Targaryens at a brisk pace or Wicked turning Oz into a billion-dollar IP factory. Or maybe just blame it on the fact we all need a little on-screen escape at the moment. Whatever the reason, movie magic is what fans are craving right now.
Before streamers decided every Tolkien-adjacent property needed an extended cinematic universe, Hollywood quietly cranked out fantasy films that didn’t always find their audience on release. Some flopped at the box office, others got buried under louder releases and never quite resurfaced, but time has been a lot kinder to all of them. Here are the forgotten fantasy films worth queuing up for your next binge-watch.
‘Stardust’ (2007)
Neil Gaiman’s fantasy adaptation got crushed at the box office by The Bourne Ultimatum, which sounds completely ridiculous in retrospect as only one of these movies has a flying pirate ship captained by Robert De Niro in a corset. The film follows Tristan — played by Charlie Cox in his pre-Daredevil floppy-haired era — a lovesick shop boy who crosses a magical wall to retrieve a fallen star for the girl he wants to marry. That star turns out to be Yvaine, played by Claire Danes, with appropriate amounts of celestial annoyance.
Michelle Pfeiffer plays the witch hunting Yvaine’s heart for eternal youth, and she’s having the time of her life chewing the scenery into mulch. The whole thing feels like a fan-fiction version of The Princess Bride with just enough charm and weird to remind you Gaiman wrote it.
‘Dragonheart’ (1996)
Dragonheart is a movie where Sean Connery voices a CGI dragon, Dennis Quaid is a washed-up knight, and the two eventually become friends in order to con villagers out of their coin. That’s the pitch, and we’ll warn you now, you’ll be bawling like a baby by the end of this thing. The plot also involves a tyrannical king (David Thewlis) whose life is saved when Connery’s Draco donates half his heart, only for the king to grow up evil anyway. Quaid plays the disillusioned knight hunting down the last of the fiery breed until he meets Draco and decides to run scams on ignorant peasants instead.
The CGI work here was advanced for its time, and Connery’s vocal performance works harder than more prestige fare of its kind. It’s the kind of earnest, mid-budget fantasy nobody makes anymore because Disney bought all the IP and turned it into a content pipeline. It’s worth revisiting, if just to remember when studios took chances on bonkers premises.
‘The Fall’ (2006)
Tarsem Singh‘s visually deranged passion project spent years in development hell before getting a tiny theatrical release in 2008, where it baffled critics and grossed a big ‘ol goose egg. It also happens to be one of the most beautiful movies ever made, shot in more than two dozen countries with practically no CGI. A paralyzed Hollywood stuntman (Lee Pace) in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital tells a fanciful story to a young immigrant girl (Catinca Untaru) with a broken arm. As his real-life motivations turn darker, the story he’s spinning for her warps along with them. Untaru’s performance is one of the great child performances on film, partly because Tarsem reportedly never told her when cameras were rolling and just let her improvise responses to Pace.
The fantasy sequences feature impossible landscapes, surreal costumes, and color palettes you’ve never seen anywhere else. After being unavailable on streaming for over a decade due to rights issues, the film finally got a proper restoration from MUBI in 2024, so you’ve got no excuse not to watch now.
‘The Pagemaster’ (1994)
A live-action and animation hybrid about an anxious kid (Macaulay Culkin) who gets struck by lightning in a library and turns into a cartoon character, then has to make his way home through stories representing different literary genres. Seriously, why haven’t you pressed play yet? With Christopher Lloyd playing both the spooky librarian and the voice of the titular Pagemaster, plus a voice cast that includes Patrick Stewart and Whoopi Goldberg, there’s so much good here.
Watching The Pagemaster now, when book bans are a daily news cycle and reading rates among kids have cratered, the film’s earnest argument for getting lost in literature lands harder than it did in 1994. The animation is also more textured and interesting than most CGI-saturated kids’ movies get today, with Moby Dick and Jekyll and Hyde sequences that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Tim Burton movie. In other words, it’s thrilling, scary, and utterly memorable.
‘Ladyhawke’ (1985)
The ’80s were a great decade for absurd fantasy concepts. Exhibit A: Ladyhawke. A cursed pair of lovers are transformed into a hawk by day and a wolf by night, meaning they can never see each other in human form. Rutger Hauer plays the man and Michelle Pfeiffer plays the woman, with Matthew Broderick along for the ride as the wisecracking thief who agrees to help them break the curse.
The film is somehow simultaneously gorgeous (those Italian castles!) and off-puttingly experimental (a synth-rock score, really?). Pfeiffer plays one of those silent, ethereal medieval women who appear to subsist entirely on yearning and rye bread, yet, it works. The premise is preposterous, but the execution is sincere.
‘Death Becomes Her’ (1992)
Robert Zemeckis followed up Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit with this jet-black comedy about two frenemies who drink a potion that grants them eternal life but, crucially, not eternal preservation. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn play Madeline and Helen, lifelong rivals obsessed with looking young at all costs. Bruce Willis is the spineless mortician husband stuck between them, and Isabella Rossellini shows up as a mysterious witch peddling immortality from a Beverly Hills mansion.
It earned an Oscar for visual effects and then disappeared from the cultural conversation, only to be rediscovered as a camp masterpiece somewhere around 2015 when gifs of Streep’s head twisted backward started circulating on Tumblr. The film’s take on aging and the depths people will go to fight feels weirdly prescient now that we live in the Hollywood facelift era.
‘Reign of Fire’ (2002)
A pre-Batman Christian Bale and a pre-True Detective Matthew McConaughey play post-apocalyptic dragon hunters in this 2002 fantasy-action dystopia that everyone forgets exists. Construction workers in modern-day London accidentally awaken a hibernating dragon, which proceeds to multiply and torch most of human civilization. By the time we catch up with the survivors decades later, Bale is running a commune in Northumberland and McConaughey has gone fully feral as an American army commander hunting dragons with a tank. Gerard Butler also hangs around as Bale’s best friend.
McConaughey is fully committed to playing a man who has lost his mind. He’s bald, ripped, smoking cigars, screaming about killing dragons, and chewing through dialogue like he’s campaigning for an Oscar. (Don’t worry, he’ll get one later.) The film flopped on release but predicted the existence of every gritty dragon-centric prestige drama that came after.
‘The Sword in the Stone’ (1963)
Disney’s animated take on T.H. White’s The Once and Future King is the studio’s middle-child movie, sandwiched between 101 Dalmatians and The Jungle Book and routinely forgotten in retrospectives. The plot loosely follows the young Arthur (Rickie Sorensen, Richard Reitherman, and Robert Reitherman) as he’s trained by the eccentric wizard Merlin (Karl Swenson) to become king. Madame Mim (Martha Wentworth) shows up as a chaotic rival wizard in a sequence that genuinely terrified us as children.
The animation is sketchy in the best way, with that loose line work the studio used through most of the 1960s. The film’s pacing is leisurely, and the plot meanders considerably. Wart spends a surprising amount of time learning physics through being transformed into a fish, a flying squirrel, and all manner of woodland creatures. That kind of weird, low-stakes storytelling has no equivalent in contemporary kids’ content, which is locked into a structure of traumatic backstory with a power-up sequence and a final battle. Rewatching it now feels almost relaxing.
‘City of Ember’ (2008)
This adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau‘s novel underperformed in 2008 and has been quietly building a cult fandom ever since. In City of Ember, humans have been living underground for over 200 years in a city designed to outlast a coming catastrophe, but the generator is failing and the instructions for escape have been lost. Saoirse Ronan plays Lina, a young messenger who teams up with her friend Doon (Harry Treadaway) to crack the city’s secrets before everything goes dark. Bill Murray plays the corrupt mayor, with Tim Robbins and Martin Landau providing some bulk in supporting roles.
The production design is the real reason to watch. Ember is rendered as a dim, copper-toned maze of pipes and crumbling buildings that makes the city feel lived-in and claustrophobic in ways most YA dystopias don’t bother attempting. Given how YA fantasy has since collapsed into a CGI-soaked indistinguishable mass, City of Ember’s tactile approach feels almost radical.
‘Tale of Tales’ (2015)
Matteo Garrone‘s English-language debut is technically a fantasy movie and also a horror movie and also a very dark comedy and also definitely not for children, despite drawing from some familiar 17th-century fairy tales. Three interlocking stories follow a queen (Salma Hayek) who eats a sea monster’s heart to conceive a child, a king (Toby Jones) obsessed with raising a giant flea as a pet, and a second king (Vincent Cassel) tricked into bedding an elderly woman with magical aspirations.
The film barely made it to American theaters and got misclassified as art-house. Really, it’s a pre-Disney fairy tale taken seriously, with all the body horror and amorality that implies.
