GregHowley.com

Esoteric to Mainstream

December 3, 2013 -

It's so interesting to note the ways in which the things that were once obscure parts of geek culture have become totally mainstream in 2013. Comic book movies are now big money at the box office. The Song of Ice and Fire series has become a hugely popular television show. And we have Transformers movies. Terrible, terrible, Transformers movies.

To this end, I shall now look into my crystal ball and attempt to extrapolate on how this trend will continue to play out in the future. Yes - it's another installment of Future History!


With the conclusion of the Game of Thrones Television series in 2016, HBO announces their next fantasy novel to television series adaptation: The Wheel of Time. The longer form of television allows HBO to continue with the one-season-per-book model pioneered with Game of Thrones, and the first six seasons of Wheel of Time achieve landmark ratings. Books 7 and 8 are compressed into a single season, and rated so poorly that the show is cancelled before the book series is completed. Still, it is at this point that television producers realize that a key element in having a successful book-to-TV adaptation is adhering as closely to the original story as possible. Failures such as the Legend of the Seeker series, the Dresden Files TV series, and the Eragon movie are accepted to have failed commercially because of their divergence from the original storylines.

In 2018, The Elfstones of Shannara becomes the highest-rated epic fantasy movie since Lord of the Rings.

Video game movies that do not suck begin in the year 2019 with Valve's first big-budget movie: Half-Life. It is this generation's Star Wars. Old fogey geeks are heard commenting "When I was your age, video game movies sucked. And we liked it that way! Have you seen Doom? Have you seen Super Mario Brothers?!?" This movie is followed up in 2018 by a Legend of Zelda film, a Starcraft movie, and of course a Grand Theft Auto movie. All of them, astonishingly, do not suck.