The reason I went MCU thing is simple: To make a truly great fantasy film you need to blend things together. Take Star Wars for example.
Not the modern ones, or the prequels, not even Empire or Jedi. But actual honest to god Star Wars. New Hope, 4, whatever subtitle you want to slap onto it after the fact. Star. Wars.
You've got a Spy introduction. Then it turns into a coming of age story. Then a prison break. Then a WW2 movie centered around La Resistance. All of it wrapped up in Sci Fi and Fantasy, together.
And when I say "War Movie" I'm talking Tora Tora Tora and stuff. I'm talking situation rooms and maps and intimate close-up shots inside cockpits and spectacle shots of fast-moving vehicles swooping over the landscape and dogfighting.
All the while aping The Hidden Fortress, a Japanese film from '58 in which two bumbling peasants wind up being the key to rescuing a princess and saving a failing Rebellion.
Star Wars is not a film that Lucas came up with whole-cloth to hit a set of specific notes, filmed in a single consistent style, and presented whole as a monolithic piece. Star Wars is four or five different movies and styles pressed together into one harmonious whole (largely thanks to ridiculous quantities of editing).
Compare that to the D&D Movie we got with Irons. The setting and story were both created whole-cloth, a monolithic shooting style was chosen, and what weight the movie had was lost both to terrible CGI and a convoluted attempt to make a "Fantasy Epic" out of literally nothing. And the only thing that made it -remotely- D&D was the Beholder (which was treated like a guard dog instead of a terrifying monster) and a few spell-references here and there.
Strip the name "Dungeons and Dragons" off it and it would've been largely interchangeable with a ton of other late 90s through 2000s schlocky fantasy flicks and B-movies except people would've gone "Oh, hey... they had enough budget to get some famous people in it..."
Do -more- with D&D than "Fantasy Movie" and it'll make bank by standing out from the crowd.
