It was among his lowest fantasy outputs in the past couple of seasons.
And judging from its lousy opening weekend figures (less than $4m on some 3,000 screens across the US - the lowest fantasy blockbuster opening yet), the word is already out.
It's that sort of vaguely low-fantasy, grit-and-gore (melo drama set against a basic gameplay system that cribs from Rockstar's horses-for-muscle-cars Red Dead Redemption, takes out the guns and lets you spit fire from your fingertips instead.
The success of Game of Thrones in the last few years – both its HBO television series and original novels by George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire – has put CD Projekt RED in a great position regarding their own low-fantasy, high-violence offering.
After her RKO contract ended, she starred in the low-budget fantasy thriller Oriental Evil (1951), as an American woman in Tokyo looking for the dastardly opium runner responsible for the death of her brother.
Drive east out of Uruguay's Punta del Este peninsula and eventually the bland tower blocks of this party town give way to a strip of the most incredible low-rise fantasy holiday homes anywhere: elongated, cubist, minimalist.
We're used to moralizing announcers, racially-tinged analysis, subtle and obvious sexism, and the lot, but something about Baseball Boyfriend, a new low-intensity fantasy baseball game designed by A View from the Seats (whoever they are) and CBS Sports, who are usually outstanding, seems wronger than the normal course of things.
Like Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, he cut his teeth on a low-budget, fantasy-inflected oddity before graduating to this effects-heavy blockbuster.
"Peter and the Starcatcher," a whimsical exercise in story theater that I had seen at the New York Theater Workshop a year earlier, more than withstood my fears that its low-tech, fantasy-spinning charms would evaporate in a big Broadway house.
