Nicole Kidman in The Golden Compass

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

Fantasy fans have had a big void in their viewing calender ever since the Return of the King ended the Lord of the Rings franchise in christmas 2003. The optimism over the Narnia franchise being the replacement were dashed last year when the first movie in the series released was horribly bland and overall pretty bad.

But fear not, "The Golden Compass" which is set to be the first movie installment of the author Phillip Pullman's best selling trilogy "His Dark Materials" may be able to do what Narnia couldn't and fill that void. Having not read the books I'm not quite sure what it's about exactly apart from knowing that it's an coming of age epic fantasy involing witches, goblins and other such creatures. Nicole Kidman has been cast to play Mrs. Coulter, an evil teacher with a dark past. Sounds good to me, I'm a bit of a fantasy geek, but hopefully this won't let me down as much as Narnia did last year.