Since I had a free couple of nights and I was enjoying my newly repaired living room, I thought I’d do a couple of movie nights over the weekend. And then I ran into a problem: there’s very little of the sort of thing I want to watch, and I’ve already got those things more or less memorized.

I wanted a kind of romantic fantasy adventure — something that’s more about a small group of characters than about an epic cast of thousands, as fantasy tends to go these days. Basically, I want Stardust, but that I haven’t seen a gazillion times and almost have memorized. Or The Princess Bride, and ditto. If you go back to the 80s and don’t mind bad (to current eyes) special effects, there’s Ladyhawke (but I wish we could get the edition with the music from the European release because the US music is so out of whack with that movie) or Willow. A couple of the “fantasy cheese” movies they used to show on Saturday nights on SyFy kind of fit, but they can also be rather painful.

And that seems to be about it. I did a lot of scrolling and searching on Amazon Prime and a few other services and didn’t come up with much of anything. I ended up watching Thor on Friday night because I figured that his backstory would be more fantasy-like (it was), and there was romance and action, but it didn’t quite scratch the itch. For Saturday night, I rewatched the Disney live-action Cinderella, which is pretty much my “happy place” movie. I guess the big carriage chase sort of tips it into the “adventure” category, so it might loosely fit what I’m looking for.

It does seem like the fantasy genre has gone to where it’s either a fairly dark epic with lots of battles, like Lord of the Rings, or it’s fairy tales done by Disney. I like the Disney fairy tales, but they’re not quite what I’m looking for.

A live-action version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty might be fun — and not from Maleficent’s perspective where she’s the real victim (ugh). Do it more like Cinderella, where it was a new telling of the same tale, with a few nods to the Disney cartoon, rather than a direct remake of the Disney cartoon. Flesh out the relationships and characters, maybe have Philip and Aurora meet a few more times (they can have been running into each other in the woods throughout their lives), and then there’s the potential for an epic action sequence near the end with the battle with the dragon.

Are there any romantic fantasy adventure films I’m missing? Something along the lines of Stardust?