Fantasy was once something relegated to the realm of childhood. Since the advent of the internet, the genre has grown by leaps and bounds, increasingly expanding into the adult market with fans able to connect digitally and share their experiences online.

A UBC professor decided to investigate this phenomenon, and conducted the world's largest audience research survey about it.

"We were prompted by an observation that fantasy now, especially film fantasy, is considered more serious than ever," UBC theatre and film associate head Ernest Mathijs stated. "Until the beginning of the 21st century, fantasy was something trivial, something you should grow out of at a certain age."

Mathijs, who teaches courses on cult cinema and movie audiences, led the survey with two principal researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales (Martin Baker and Matt Hills), and involved 146 scholars from 45 countries.

The survey, which took two years to prepare, launched on December 1, 2014 and ran until the summer of 2015. It was translated into over 30 languages, with responses from 35,000 people.

In analyzing the responses, Mathijs observed that audiences found ways to view the works in relation to real-life issues.

"As long as audiences feel that a story has enough weight, enough depth, they will find a way to make it speak to their world," he stated. "The Hobbit didn’t quite achieve that because audiences were mildly disappointed by the film and didn’t think it had that much depth. But those that felt the film had depth, and those that referred to just how much depth the earlier franchise, The Lord of the Rings, had, made it relate to the world. People thought the film had messages about terrorism, ethnic differences, and particularly about racial differences and gender differences. Audiences really want to see these films mean something".

Mathijs previously conducted a 2013 survey for The Lord of the Rings, which drew 25,000 responses in 17 languages.

"One of the things that we discovered with The Lord of the Rings research was that its reach and popularity are not a new phenomenon. This goes back to 1937 when The Hobbit was first published. So this has a decades-long fandom already, and this is a cross-generational enterprise. This allows parents who would have read The Hobbit to their young children to invite them to come watch it when they’re a bit older."

A new research project, the World Star Wars Project, is being launched by colleagues of Mathijs. Like The Hobbit research, he said that preliminary results indicate that audiences are similarly comparing storylines in Star Wars to understand current issues in real life.

"In the case of Star Wars, there is a clear analogy between the battle of dark and light forces in the films and the terrorism that we see today around the world. I was allowed a quick peek at some of the early comments in the World Star Wars Project, and you see references to the Paris attacks and the clash between civilizations. So audiences will use those contemporary, topical events in order to help figure out the film, and they will use the film to help figure out the world."