By Drew Dietsch
| Published
Hey everyone, Drew Dietsch here again for Giant Freakin Robot, and this time I get to talk about something I love that I’ve never gotten to highlight before: dragons!
Ever since I read The Hobbit and watched the 1977 animated adaptation (still my favorite version of Smaug), I’ve been enamored with these ferocious fantasy creatures.
So much so, I even watched The Flight of Dragons, where John Ritter uses logic to defeat a multi-headed evil dragon sorcerer voiced by Darth Vader.
And my generation was primed to get dragon fever thanks to the blockbuster production DragonHeart being such a success.
But before the dragon market got monopolized by HBO, there was another dragon movie I was excited for in my youth.
And this one looked like it could be the best serious representation of dragons ever in a major motion picture up to that point.
But this movie was nowhere near the success of DragonHeart and remains a cult favorite at best.
We’re going to sift through the ashes to find out why Reign of Fire failed.
Like a lot of original high-concept stories, Reign of Fire existed as a script for years before it ever made its way into production.
The key story concept is that dragons have been hidden under the earth and are released at the start of the movie.
This leads to the mass slaughter of humans to the point of a post-apocalyptic society.
The main story involves a surviving community hiding from the dragons. When a wandering warrior enters this community, they end up being brought into fighting the fiery monsters.
So, here’s an initial and admittedly low-impact theory as to why audiences weren’t lining up for Reign of Fire, but it’s a point I think speaks to how selling an audience on an idea can be more nuanced than it initially seems.
Take a look at the Reign of Fire posters.
You see dragons burning the London landscape as made obvious by Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster.
That’s selling a dragonpocalypse movie akin to something like Independence Day. “Come see dragons (instead of aliens) destroy the world!”
But if you look at the actual footage from Reign of Fire by looking at what they used for the trailer, that idea doesn’t seem to be what the movie actually represents.
Instead of Roland Emmerich-like chaotic glee, Reign of Fire looks to be a very straight-faced and serious take on dragons versus humans.
And that’s what the movie is.
It’s not a movie about dragons destroying the world. Reign of Fire is actually a movie about a world already destroyed by dragons. That’s where the bulk of the plot takes place.
That probably didn’t seem appealing to some viewers right from the outset who wanted to see a dragonpocalypse movie that was more like a disaster thrill ride.
Y’know, Twister but with dragons. And that ain’t Reign of Fire.
By the time it was in front of cameras, Reign of Fire had X-Files director Rob Bowman at the helm.
Bowman had not only been a featured director for many key episodes of The X-Files TV series, but was also the director for the first feature film in the franchise.
And much like he did with The X-Files, Bowman wanted to ground a supernatural story in a sense of realism.
With this in mind, Reign of Fire ends up looking pretty darn good if your artistic aim is to create a grungy, desperate world that’s nearly been obliterated.
Unfortunately, with a concept as big and bold as “dragons are real and exist in a modern setting”, there were also audiences who just weren’t going to buy into this concept at all.
Understand, I think this is more to do with the overall sentiment of the times than any lasting issues with Reign of Fire.
Pop culture had just experienced a fantasy revival with the first Harry Potter film and the first Lord of the Rings film, both historic successes and movies that would earn their place as genre classics.
Reign of Fire released just months after these movies and was selling audiences on a modern, gritty, and grounded take on a classical fantasy idea.
It was trying to do this at a time when the classical fantasy elements of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings were being embraced by wide audiences and finding their home in pop culture.
Basically, it was the wrong time to get folks on board with Reign of Fire’s artistic take. Today, this is probably an idea that could work thanks to a post-Game of Thrones landscape allowing for less fanciful riffs on fantasy.
It didn’t help that Reign of Fire was lacking in star power for the time.
Matthew McConaughey gets top billing but his warrior American is a supporting character at best. And though he certainly had some cache, he was not some bankable star back in 2002.
Even less noteworthy for the time was Christian Bale. Though he’d definitely had a breakout role in American Psycho, he had yet to don the cape and cowl and become a household name.
Look, I like Newsies just as much as you do, but Christian Bale was not a name that was getting the family to the drive-in that weekend in 2002.
Same goes for Gerard Butler, who at the time people may have recognized from, I don’t know, Dracula 2000 if anything?
So we’ve got a dragonpocalypse movie where we don’t get to see the dragonpocalypse happen, a grimly realistic take on dragons during a time when classical fantasy is at a pop culture peak, and a cast that has yet to make their biggest marks in the acting world.
Add to that Reign of Fire releasing during the second week of a highly-anticipated sequel, Men In Black II, as well as very mixed reviews and you have a recipe for a $60 million effects flick that opened at the number three spot with $15.6 million.
Reign of Fire could only barely beat the opening weekend of the Halloween movie where Busta Rhymes uses kung fu on Michael Myers.
At least it lost the number two spot to a great comic book movie, Road to Perdition, one of my top five favorite Tom Hanks movies.
Now, if you want my opinion on Reign of Fire as a movie, you can get the long version in the GenreVision Movie Club episode we did where we put it up against DragonHeart.
But while I can applaud the dragon effects in Reign of Fire, the actual movie is just okay. It’s not amazing or terrible and that makes it a little less interesting as a whole.
However, I will say that Reign of Fire is the kind of movie that deserves another shot, either through a reboot or a sequel/prequel.
I mean, DragonHeart got four sequels! Four sequels! And I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them! Except that they probably have dragons in them. Maybe one of the sequels has two dragons? Maybe those dragons are friend dragons or maybe they’re not friend dragons. I don’t know and I’ll never know.
But I do know that the idea of doing The Terminator but with dragons destroying humanity instead of robot skeletons sounds pretty cool.
Reign of Fire promised a movie that would do that but didn’t quite deliver. There’s still time to make good on that promise.
And as it stands, Reign of Fire is the kind of movie that deserves a cult following.
It’s an ambitious and unique idea that wasn’t quite right for the time. It doesn’t help that the actual production had to deal with a disease outbreak, leading to certain scenes being cut or rewritten out of necessity.
So I have some sympathy for Reign of Fire also being an unfairly compromised shoot.
With every other intellectual property under the sun getting put through the content churn, why not give Reign of Fire another try? It can’t be worse than that last Game of Thrones season!
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