The sustained barrage of YA literary adaptations and would-be fantasy epics that saturated the marketplace in the early part of the 21st Century can largely be attributed to the popularity of the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings franchises, even if only a tiny fraction of spiritual successors reached a modicum of similar success. 2006’s Eragon did make a lot of money, but it was resoundingly trashed by both critics and fans of the source material.
It might come as a surprise to discover that the derided adventure was actually a hugely profitable enterprise, with the fantastical folly racking up $250 million at the box office on a $100 million budget, before going on to shift $89 million worth of copies on home video in the United States alone, so there was no way it can be labeled as a commercial disaster.
That being said, a 16 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, 46 percent audience approval rating, and the fact readers of author Christopher Paolini’s The Inheritance Cycle actively detested the film ensured there was hardly a vocal demand for 20th Century Fox to continue churning out sequels.
In an on-brand twist of irony that’s perfectly fitting for the internet, supporters spent years demanding that Eragon be rebooted as a TV series to do the property justice at last. It might genuinely be happening – with Disney Plus announcing the project last summer – but not only do a rogue band of Redditors think it’s going to be another terrible take on the story, but there’s even a growing sentiment that the Mouse House’s cost-cutting measures are going to see it canceled altogether.
You spend over a decade waiting for a new Eragon project, and then when it happens, you’re either not interested or unconvinced that it’ll actually make it to the small screen.
