By David Young · June 3, 2024
Fantasy worlds and the stories within them can reveal a lot. They can warn of dangers in the real world or provide a place for our minds to escape. Fantasy is as much a mood and a setting as a genre, which means there are some great movies out there—all of which bring something a little different to the name of fantasy in general.
Screenplay by: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and J.R.R. Tolkien
The trendsetter for decades now, Tolkien’s masterpiece novels made it to the screen at the turn of the century to bring even more people into Middle-Earth. With Peter Jackson’s cinematic adaptation of Fellowship comes the iconic beginning of an unexpected hero’s quest to thwart the return of an ancient evil.
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Screenplay by: Guillermo del Toro
In true Guillermo del Toro fashion, Pan’s Labyrinth grips audiences in a freshly imagined world rife with mythological inspiration and steeped in political turmoil. The eerie landscape where Ofelia finds herself promises an escape from the frightening reality of war, offering an equally dangerous world of magical creatures like the Pale Man lying in wait for her.
Download the script!Read More: How To Write A Fantasy World Based on Your Experiences
Screenplay by: Adrian Molina and Matthew Aldrich
Bringing music and magic into the Land of the Dead, Coco is an animated feature that follows Miguel as he goes to great lengths in pursuit of a family blessing to find his way back home—and to get a chance to do what he loves most: making music.
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Screenplay by: Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman
With Neil Gaiman’s trademark subversiveness comes the lighthearted, inventive, and downright strange fantasy epic that follows a young man as he crosses the Wall between his ho-hum village and the hidden magical world beyond—all in the pursuit of love and a fallen star.
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Screenplay by: Warren Skaaren and Michael McDowell
What happens when you practically have a poltergeist for hire? Nothing good, really. Adam and Barbara are deceased and unable to keep their home from new living owners. They then learn just how bad things can get by bringing an expert spiritual nuisance into the mix—all of which makes this story a great look at how morbid and crude fantasy can be.
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Screenplay by: Jon Spaihts, Eric Roth and Denis Villeneuve
Fantasy isn’t always about spells and spirits—sometimes, it’s about spice. A strange, new world is an iconic part of fantasy, and Dune delivers as much, giving audiences impossibly large sandworms, superpowered mutants, and magical space dust. And that’s all without including the holy war and political intrigue leading up to the eventual remaking of an entire planet.
Download the script!Read More: 10 Movies That Made It Out of Development Hell, From ‘Dune’ to ‘Avatar’
Screenplay by: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou
A dystopia may be, but The City has rules that must be followed. One such rule is what happens to people who don’t find love: They’re sent into The Woods as animals, never again to experience humanity. Unsettling and unnatural, this tale marries that fairy-tale idea with the bleak and unforgiving lens of modern efficiency in a cold future.
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Screenplay by: J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves
Every year, Harry Potter escapes the abusive, mundane world of his so-called family and finds himself back at his school for witches and wizards. As one of the most magic-filled installments of the series, Prisoner of Azkaban infuses wonder into every minute of Harry’s return to Hogwarts, which is no longer safe thanks to an escaped wizarding convict.
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Screenplay by: Linda Woolverton, Charles Perrault, and Milt Banta
There’s another side to every tale, including classic fantasy stories. In this retelling of the events in Sleeping Beauty (1959), you might even learn a different villain is to blame.
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Screenplay by: William Davies, Dean DeBlois, and Chris Sanders
If fantasy causes your brain to spring up with images of dragons, you’re not alone. But are they the dastardly, evil lizards we’ve seen in Arthurian legends? One pacifist dares to look at the flying terrors differently, soon discovering they’re not all that different from us.
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Screenplay by: David Lowery
Speaking of Arthurian legends, the poem of Sir Gawain is one of the most well-known in that branch of medieval fantasy. In this reimagined cautionary tale, the foolhardy knight-to-be takes up a mysterious knight’s challenge, only for his choice’s cost to hover over him for the following year.
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Screenplay by: George Lucas
A story so epic that it spans numerous episodes, Luke Skywalker’s mantle as a Jedi becomes but a daunting promise in this first installation, full of responsibility. But this picture-perfect example of the hero’s journey brings new hope to the Rebel Alliance in their fight against the Empire and its greatest weapon of terror, Darth Vader.
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Screenplay by: David Magee
Sometimes, real life gets touched by the unexplained—and Life of Pi shows that off in spades. As Pi finds himself stranded in the sea with no one but a tiger for company, his encounters along that journey inspire a sense of wonder and respect for the magic that surrounds us all.
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Screenplay by: David Koepp and Martin Donovan
When the natural world and the unnatural meet, magical realism can bring ideas like immortality to an audience in new ways. The black comedy Death Becomes Her fits the bill by showing off the worst of everlasting life with a lesson: Bitterness can outlive beauty if you let it.
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Screenplay by: Charise Castro Smith and Jared Bush
In a family all blessed with magical powers, Mirabel’s struggle with her identity as the only one without a gift seems to start a pending disaster. That disaster may strip her family of their sacred seclusion in Colombia and the source of their gifts—showing just how mercurial some magic can be.
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Screenplay by: Ted Elliott, Terry Rossio, Stuart Beattie, and Jay Wolpert
An army of undead and a curse is all you need to give a fantasy story a little bit of an edge. Luckily, Pirates of the Caribbean got the memo and began their epic series of films with the supernatural while still capturing the old-school charm of seafaring adventure novels.
Download the script!Read More: Unleash Your Inner Explorer: Films That Capture the Spirit of Adventure
Screenplay by: L. Frank Baum, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf
In one of the most well-known fantasy stories ever written, The Wizard of Oz shows a brand-new world where Dorothy winds up after a chance encounter with a twister—a world that may or may not be in her head. Real or not, there are witches, flying monkeys, and allegorical symbols everywhere, the last one making it a more traditional fantasy tale than at first glance.
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Screenplay by: Henry Selick
Fantasy stories often put a hero in a new world, and Coraline can choose between her own and the parallel universe she finds by accident. That said, there may be some drastic differences in the Other World that Coraline will discover the hard way.
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Screenplay by: Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, and Keith Bunin
Onward imagines Ian and Barley, two elf brothers, in a fantasy world adapted to prefer technology and forget the magical arts. But on Ian’s birthday, he receives a staff that he and Barley use to partially resurrect their late father and bring him along on an impromptu quest to finish the spell.
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Screenplay by: William Goldman
A tongue-in-cheek tale of daring heroes and love that conquers, this hilarious adventure inspires as much as it entertains — with just a touch of magic here and there to stack the odds and make this imagined low-fantasy world fit the romantic ideal.
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There’s an undeniable power in being whisked away to other worlds and seeing the magic of those worlds come to life. Whether it’s high fantasy with elves and wizards or a twisted political thriller with magic space dust, movies in the genre of “fantasy” run the gamut.
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