With the move to streaming things are even less popular, as you will only see it if you have the streaming service. The Lord of the Rings films were a huge deal, this new Middle Earth series on Amazon will only be seen by people with the service and it will be competing with the Game of Thrones spinoff (which may get its own spinoff), The Witcher, The Wheel of Time, a Disney+ series based on Willow and no doubt other things already in development. There's also various Star Wars and Marvel series in existence or development.
I've heard and read little to no discussion on The Wheel of Time, I wonder if it will soon be cancelled. I think the Middle Earth series will get a buzz in the lead up to starting which will soon fade, extremely quickly if they dump all the episodes at once. Subsequent series will get less and less buzz and it will get lost in the mulch of expensive Fantasy series that people take for granted and ignore.
I remember reading an observation that the final series of GoT and Avengers: Endgame represented the end of monoculture, them being the last narrative media that captured the zeitgeist so completely due to streaming and the further breakdown of the monoculture we've had since the World wide web. The most recent Spiderman came a lot closer to capturing some of that, so there's still some fumes in the tank.
I dare say there will soon be some sort of Harry Potter streaming series for HBO Max, I imagine Time Warner are negotiating this with Rowling right now. If you told the me of twenty years ago that there would be all this Fantasy/fantastical TV and film, I'd never believe it. If you also told me I'd ignore virtually all of it and wearily view at it as an exhausting morass of nothing, I'd have been truly incredulous. Nonetheless, here we are.
