Samtemdo8 said:
Superheroes and Sci Fi were fringe at one point. Why is fantasy still a fringe genre?
Sci-fi is still fringe, but that aside, I can give the following suggestions:
-Superheroes are mostly set in our own world, so it's easier for the average person to get invested. A lot of fantasy takes place in its own world, so from the outset, there's a higher barrier to entry.
-Fantasy tends to be dense once you reach the adult level. As in, the books are long, and there's a helluva lot of books in a series. Superheroes don't have to deal with that. While comics are a niche medium, you can easily read a comic/graphic novel in but a fraction of the time of a 1000+ page book. And even your average superhero film will be compressed into a reasonable running time. To cite a personal example, working in a library (going by statistics released in one of the networks I work at, adult fantasy books are the second least borrowed, being only more popular than horror), in junior fiction or young adult, fantasy books tend to be reasonably popular - the Harry Potters and Percy Jacksons of the world. Once you get to adult however, interest in fantasy plummets.
-Superhero material tends to deal with simplistic themes via simplistic characters. That may be a generalization, but your average superhero flick is "good guy fights bad guy, good guy wins," usually in the scope of 32 comic pages. Fantasy can (and often does) boil down to good vs. evil scenarios, but they're scenarios that tend to be much more fleshed out. Lord of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia bother have binary worlds for instance, but there's plenty of themes packaged in both works. In contrast, if Spider-Man beats the Green Goblin (again), what is there to take in other than "yay, Peter won?"
-Fantasy has a stigma attached to it that it's all ultimately derivative of Tolkien. And while there's some truth to that, it's a simplified truth. Superheroes have stigma as well, but through stuff like the MCU (bleh), they seem to have overcome that.
Also why did Chronicles of Narnia fail? They had 2 fairly successful movies especially the first one. Third one everyone agreed wasn't that spectacular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia:_The_Voyage_of_the_Dawn_Treader#Commercial_analysis
That might give you an idea, but TBH...I don't know.
Of the recent film series (not talking about the BBC ones), I quite liked LWW. Yes, it sacrificed some thematic depth from the book, but replaced it by being a pretty fun fantasy adventure. And despite what the article above says, I don't buy the idea that Narnia can only appeal to Christian audiences. Not a Christian myself, but I loved these books as a kid. As an adult, and being able to better appreciate the themes/allusions, I still quite like them (well, not The Last Battle, but hey, 6/7 is still good). Maybe I'm the outlier, but there's stillf "Christian films" I like as someone who's irreligious.
But apparently The Silver Chair is being made (good) that was apparently meant to be a reboot (how do you start any Narnia series with Silver Chair?), so, um, yay?