The British Fantasy Cult Classics That Deserve a Reboot

Whether you’re down to rollick around history with Apple TV+’s new reimagining of Time Bandits or you think the reboot of the classic 1981 fantasy movie got lost in all those timelines, there’s a clear hunger for Britain’s brand of fantasy, once confined mainly to feature films, to be revived on the small screen. Disney+ recently attempted Willow, Max has three seasons of His Dark Materials, and now the new remake of Time Bandits proves that reimagining classics for the streaming age is the right idea, especially if they didn’t get it completely right the first time.

Britain’s history of mysticism and Arthurian legend means it’s sprouted one of the most enviable libraries of fantasy fiction on Earth. In the last hundred years alone, there’s been The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, all three of which are in various states of small screen remakes/spinoffs themselves – and that says nothing of the child-friendly tales of earlier authors Lewis Carroll or J.M. Barrie, both of whom have gotten cartoon feature films and live action ones. Now that everyone’s excited at firm fantasy favorites returning to the small screen, we've taken the liberty of listing ten British fantasy properties that deserve a television reboot.

Before Time Bandits, director Terry Gilliam staged a different fantasy starring his fellow Monty Python members, Jabberwocky. (Ed note: This film scared me senseless as a child.) Set in a pastiched version of the Dark Ages, a king’s domain is haunted by a terrible beast, and only a young peasant can slay it. 

The film underperformed on release and spent the following decades being confused for an official Monty Python film (it’s not), but Gilliam’s style of chaotic misadventure and demented satire has stayed intact — and deserves to be retried on a bigger scale.

Jabberwocky is streaming on Peacock.

Eclectic Irish director John Boorman (Excalibur) went off the deep end much earlier in his career than you’re supposed to, staging an original, metatextual, spiritual apocalypse story about human society folding in on itself in the wake of planetwide ruin. Zardoz stars Sean Connery as a red diaper-wearing exterminator who discovers a realm of apathetic immortal gods and confronts the raw material of life and death. 

It’s a fascinating mess of a film that demands to be taken seriously by showrunners who want to make strange, iconic television.

Zardoz is available as an Amazon streaming rental.

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography may not be what people accustomed to fantasy expect from the genre, but it remains one of the most influential and imaginative texts from Great Britain. In Orlando, later adapted into a film starring the chameleonic Tilda Swinton, a poet discovers the ability to be reborn as a different sex, and travels through Great Britain’s literary history in a perpetual genderqueer state. 

Sally Potter’s 1992 film worthily tackles Woolf's novel's weighty themes and dextrous prose, but Orlando’s scope begs for a long-form medium to explore all its complexities.

Orlando is available as an Apple TV rental.

To give proper context, Merlin’s popularity as a cheaply-made fantasy adventure series aimed at young audiences in 2000s Britain was only bested by Doctor Who. Following the young adventures of warlock Merlin (Colin Morgan), Prince Arthur (Bradley James), and Guinevere (Angel Coulby) in Camelot, where magic is strictly banned, this type of kid-friendly Arthurian revisionism for the young adult crowd did the most with what it was given for a respectable five seasons. 

We don’t want a recast reboot with a souped-up budget – please, if BBC producers are reading this, a reunion series would do just fine.

All five seasons of Merlin are streaming on BritBox.

The dragon apocalypse adventure film Reign of Fire landed right in the middle of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings film fever and shared very little of their collective buzz. Still, its story of a razed London (in the far-off future of 2020) battening down the hatches in the face of reawakened dragon power is elevated by a locked-in Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale. 

It’s time we updated those early-2000s action aesthetics for a couple of seasons and charted the survival of one of fantasy’s most iconic beasts.

Reign of Fire is available via rental from Fandago at Home.

Bernard Rose spun folklore into gruesome horror in the iconic Candyman (based on the writing of British horror maestro Clive Barker), but had previously explored the dark, ambiguous space between imagination and terror in Paperhouse, in which a child’s drawings blend with dreams and whole people are conjured from her subconscious. 

Paperhouse remains a lucid vision of dark fantasy, and if it makes a return, hopefully, we’ll see a revival of “kids' TV that’s a little bit too scary.”

Paperhouse is streaming on Roku.

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber: And Other Stories was a dark, disturbing, and subversive short story collection that reimagined the gendered violence of fairy tales – sometimes to highlight their inherent cruelty, sometimes to grant the female characters liberty. Collaborating with Carter in 1984, Irish director Neil Jordan crafted the tactile, sensual horror film The Company of Wolves, which holds up with dreamlike aesthetics and a burning emotional core. 

But Carter’s works all deserve to be faithfully and lovingly adapted for the screen, and a horror anthology TV version of her short stories would remind us of her prose’s timelessness.

The Company of Wolves is streaming on AMC+.

Comic writer Alan Moore famously hates adaptations of his work on principle, whether they’re good or bad (err, there haven’t been many good ones), so we might as well try a faithful, non-excruciating adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Mainstream interest was killed in this crossover team-up of classic horror and sci-fi literary characters – including Allan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, and Dorian Gray – after the disastrous 2003 film that combined all the worst instincts of early-2000s adventure with none of Moore’s precise tone and storytelling.

However, superhero ensemble shows are all the rage now, and everyone's looking for the Marvel alternative that'll stick.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is available via Disney+ with Hulu or Hulu as a standalone.

Matthew Vaughn’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s fantasy adventure, Stardust, which starred Claire Danes, Robert De Niro, and a baby-faced Charlie Cox, was a terrifically fun romp that by no means needs correcting or improving. But after the swashbuckling capers of Time Bandits, we’re ready for more portal fantasy TV, and Stardust is a prime candidate. Focusing on the relationship between a young romantic and a fallen star, Gaiman’s skill for blending the light and dark tones of fairytales has never been clearer than it is here.

Considering what a hit Good Omens and The Sandman have been, this one's ripe for reinvention.

Stardust is streaming on Paramount+.

It’s been forty years since the confusing adventures of Krull, an ambitious but underwhelming British attempt to capitalize on the 80s fantasy boom. There are magic boomerangs, cliff-face spacecraft, and a garbled plot that tries to bridge the space sieges of Star Wars and the mystical quests of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Either way, Krull is a thoroughly unique oddity in the British fantasy canon and deserves a full-bodied dramatic expansion.

Krull is available as a streaming rental on YouTube.