Fourth Wing Prime Video fantasy series, Digi Mart USA News: Michael B. Jordan has a major Prime Video fantasy show on the way, and fans of the genre should be aware that the series will divide audiences because it relies heavily on a controversial trope.
Since HBO spent an unprecedented amount on the budget of Game of Thrones season 1 in 2011, every streaming service and cable network has been working to find the next gigantic fantasy series. Prime Video’s The Rings of Power and Netflix’s The Witcher were built with similar ambition, while Prime Video’s Critical Role shows The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein share the mature content and adventure appeal of early Game of Thrones.
No single show has yet overtaken the HBO hit as the biggest fantasy series ever. HBO’s Harry Potter reboot may also struggle to match Game of Thrones, since it adapts a highly familiar property rather than a new fantasy project.
Prime Video’s upcoming Fourth Wing, starring Michael B. Jordan, could potentially outdo Game of Thrones, but it faces its own challenge.
As the first major romantasy adaptation, it will test whether this large publishing trend can translate to success on the small screen.
Romantasy is a subgenre that mixes romance of varying spice levels with the settings, tropes and characters of fantasy novels. The blend has become big business in publishing, and Rebecca Yarros’s A Court of Thorns and Roses alone has sold over 13 million copies since the series began.
Fantasy trends in publishing are not always quickly taken up by film and television, and fantasy is expensive to produce. Although Game of Thrones and its spinoffs showed a mainstream market for mature, R-rated fantasy, their tone is far from the romantic atmosphere of books like Fourth Wing.
Written by Rebecca Yarros, Fourth Wing is the first book in the Empyrean Pentalogy, followed by Iron Flame and Onyx Storm. The Prime Video show will adapt its immersive story, which follows 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail, who is forced by her strict army general mother to become a dragon rider at Basgiath War College despite a physical condition that makes her prone to injury.
While the premise may remind readers of How to Train Your Dragon, the books are much more adult in nature. The Empyrean Pentalogy is unapologetically adult in its content, with explicit sex scenes appearing surprisingly early in its enemies-to-lovers story.
The romance elements are tonally closer to Bridgerton than Game of Thrones.
Although Game of Thrones was extremely explicit, its sex scenes were as likely to be disturbing as romantic. By contrast, the Fourth Wing books are mainstream romance novels in their sexual content, so the big-budget live-action adaptation will have a markedly different tone from earlier major fantasy shows.
A heavy focus on romance and frequent sex scenes is not common in small-screen fantasy, which ranges from the PG-rated Percy Jackson and the Olympians and the relatively family-friendly The Rings of Power to hard-R shows such as House of the Dragon, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The Witcher. As a result, some fantasy fans may be put off by Fourth Wing’s style.
