7 Upcoming Fantasy Shows, Ranked by Hype

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    Image via Red Tower Books</figure>

One of the bestselling romantasy books of the 2020s, Rebecca Yarros‘s Fourth Wing is the first book of the Empyrean new adult fantasy romance series. A series adaptation of the books has been in the works at Prime Video since 2023, with Yarros serving as an executive producer on the project alongside Michael B. Jordan, Lisa Joy, Jonathan Nolan, Liz Pelletier, Athena Wickham, and showrunner Meredith Averill. The show, like the book, follows the story of Violet Sorrengail, who joins the Basgiath War College and trains to become a dragon rider, encountering deadly quests, gruelling competition, and unexpected romance. Esther McGregor will star as Violet, with Emilio Sakraya as her rival/love interest, Xaden Riorson.

Fourth Wing is one of the biggest BookTok hits of the romantasy genre, so its series adaptation has a lot of people very excited, and with good reason. Featuring fast-paced action, high-tension romance, and, of course, dragons, Fourth Wing has all the ingredients to become a fantasy TV landmark to rival Game of Thrones. Whether it will actually achieve that potential remains to be seen.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

4

‘The Dark Tower’ (TBA)

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Release Date: TBA

Mike Flanagan‘s The Dark Tower is an upcoming multi-season series adaptation of the fantasy book series by Stephen King. Published between 1982 and 2012, the books revolve around Roland Deschain, a gunslinger on an unending quest across a surreal landscape in search of the titular tower, which sits at the center of a vast multiverse. The books were previously adapted as a 2017 film, which was widely panned by critics, but the series is a complete reboot of the story, and it’s been reported that it will star Sam Strike and Jasper Pääkkönen.

Spanning eight connected novels, one novella, a children’s book, and connections to almost all of King’s celebrated novels, The Dark Tower is the holy grail of Stephen King adaptations. It’s easy to see why the upcoming series has so many people excited, even though it doesn’t have a release date or any concrete details as yet. What little we know about The Dark Tower so far suggests an in-depth adaptation that could prove to be Flanagan’s most ambitious project yet and one of the most fascinating fantasy shows ever made. Or, like the movie, it could just be an expensive failure; only time will tell.

3

‘The Stormlight Archive’ (TBA)

Release Date: TBA

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    Image via Michael Whelan</figure>

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    Image via Santa Monica</figure>

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    Image via Netflix</figure>