4 2010s Fantasy Movies That Already Need a Reboot (& Hardly Anyone Remembers Them)

Have you ever stopped to realize how many times the movie industry has tried to bet on the next big fantasy blockbuster? You lose count, especially during the 2010s, after the success of The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Chronicles of Narnia. For much of that decade, several studios spent years looking for books, video games, and other properties that could become the next big hit, and some of them worked to a certain extent, while others are barely remembered today. The funny thing is that many of these films didn’t come from bad ideas at all; they just failed for very specific reasons that weren’t enough to get audiences excited.

Many years have passed since then, but now, in 2026, maybe it’s worth considering a reboot for them. Nowadays, audiences are more used to complex and different fantasy universes, and at least 4 movies from that era could benefit from that kind of treatment.

4) Seventh Son

You probably don’t even remember that Seventh Son existed, but here’s the curious part: it was actually meant to be the beginning of a franchise (just to show how badly things went). The story follows Tom Ward (Ben Barnes), the seventh son of a seventh son, who is chosen to become the apprentice of Master Gregory (Jeff Bridges), a monster hunter, and ends up facing the witch, Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore). On paper, this should have been a pretty safe combination for a big fantasy feature: you have a young protagonist discovering his powers, an experienced mentor, witches, monsters, and a mythology based on a series of books written by Joseph Delaney. It all sounds like a solid recipe for a franchise, but the execution completely fell apart.

What happens with this movie is that it feels like the story was made exclusively to be a big blockbuster, and because of that, there’s nothing particularly special about it. It’s such a generic plot that you watch it and just don’t care about anything happening on screen. So, it makes more than enough sense to consider a reboot and actually do it right this time. Instead of trying to save what the movie did, a new adaptation of Seventh Son could go back to the source material and rebuild the universe at a slower pace, making Tom’s training really compelling, while also giving everything its own identity (especially the creatures and the witches). The material is there; it just needs someone willing to actually use it.

3) Gods of Egypt

If you remember Gods of Egypt, congratulations, because here’s a movie that somehow nobody heard about despite having a pretty stacked cast, including Gerard Butler, Geoffrey Rush, and Chadwick Boseman. The idea behind this story is to turn Egyptian mythology into characters in a big fantasy adventure: Set (Butler) takes over Egypt after defeating Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), and the mortal Bek (Brenton Thwaites) teams up with the fallen god to try to take back the throne. Hollywood usually explores Greek mythology when it wants to make this kind of project, so having something centered around Egypt was really refreshing. However, just like Seventh Son, the whole thing ended up being a pretty generic adventure where they basically slapped famous names and creatures on top of it to make it stand out.

A reboot could give the universe something that actually makes it worth exploring, rather than using it as nothing more than a backdrop for battle scenes and visual effects. Horus, Set, Isis, Osiris, and the other gods could easily carry a story built around alliances, rivalries, and power struggles, and the mortals could have a much more meaningful role in the conflict. Besides, there’s an obvious advantage to doing this now: Hollywood is looking for new IPs, especially in the fantasy genre. Gods of Egypt was a messy attempt at doing that, but the idea itself is far from exhausted. The original movie can be forgotten without any problem, but its concept shouldn’t be.

2) Warcraft

The strangest thing about Warcraft is that almost everything a fantasy blockbuster needs was already there — except for a good way to introduce it all to the audience. Sometimes a movie is generic, but other times it’s simply a matter of planning and structuring the script properly. Here, we follow the arrival of the orcs in Azeroth and the conflict that begins when Gul’dan (Daniel Wu) opens a portal to allow the Horde to invade the human world, putting Durotan (Toby Kebbell), Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel), and Medivh (Ben Foster) at the center of the war. It’s an adaptation of a game series, and for people who already knew the games, there are a huge number of references and characters; for anyone who had never played them, it’s an entire world of races, names, places, and situations to understand in just over two hours.

If the idea is to take a story and put it into another format, the script needs to be written in a way that can reach a general audience. And instead of also trying to explain all of Warcraft at once, it might make more sense to plan it in parts, to eventually turn it into a franchise, for example. A first film could start with a basic plot, introduce Azeroth little by little, and let the war grow over multiple installments — which would also give some of the characters enough time to actually work as characters instead of being just pieces of a larger universe. The world is simply too big to be left behind, and it would be well worth giving it a second shot.

1) Mortal Engines

Here, you might remember something specific about the story, but not the whole thing, which is a shame because the entire premise of Mortal Engines is still one of the most intriguing among the movies of the 2010s. Everything takes place in a future where entire cities have been turned into massive mobile machines that chase other cities to steal their resources. And in the middle of all this, there’s Hester Shaw (Hera Hilmar) and Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan), who end up caught in a conspiracy involving London and its military technology. It’s fantasy and sci-fi mixed together, and it’s a much more interesting idea on paper, since what made it to the big screen isn’t nearly as engaging.

So, how could a reboot actually do this story justice? Maybe the focus should be less on trying to prove just how big this universe is and more on making the protagonists (and other characters) memorable enough for people to want to keep following them: Hester, for example, needed more room to develop her revenge arc, and Tom could have had a more gradual storyline. Overall, Mortal Engines needed more personality. Plus, it’s also an adaptation of a highly praised book series. Its problem was just knowing how to execute all of it, because the film always seems to be in a hurry to get to the next event, which leaves everything feeling somewhat superficial by the end.

Did we miss one of your favorite forgotten fantasy movies? Let us know in the comments which one deserves a reboot.

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