Gina Prince-Bythewood brings Tomi Adeyemi’s richly imagined world of Orïsha to the big screen.
Film & TV • Fantasy • 6 Min Read
Bringing a beloved fantasy novel to the screen is never simply a matter of translating words into images. A filmmaker has to create an entire world—its landscapes, cultures, costumes, architecture, mythology, movement, and magic—and make audiences believe that the world existed long before the cameras arrived.
For Gina Prince-Bythewood, that challenge became the heart of Children of Blood and Bone, the highly anticipated film adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s bestselling novel.
Prince-Bythewood, the filmmaker behind Love & Basketball, The Old Guard, and The Woman King, has taken on the enormous task of bringing Adeyemi’s fictional kingdom of Orïsha to life. But rather than treating the story simply as another fantasy adventure, the filmmaker has approached its worldbuilding as an essential part of the film’s identity.
For Prince-Bythewood, the goal is not simply to show audiences a magical kingdom. It is to make them feel as though they have entered a culture with its own history, traditions, conflicts, beauty, and mythology.
Building the World of Orïsha
In Adeyemi’s story, Orïsha is a fictional African-inspired kingdom where magic has been violently suppressed. Zélie Adebola, a young divîner with the potential to restore magic to her people, becomes central to a struggle involving power, identity, oppression, family, and resistance.
That premise creates a huge visual responsibility for the filmmakers. Orïsha cannot simply look beautiful. It has to feel lived in.
Every part of the environment has to suggest a history. The architecture, clothing, landscapes, rituals, weapons, music, movement, and magical elements all contribute to the sense that this is a functioning society rather than a collection of fantasy sets.
That distinction is particularly important for a story whose mythology is so closely connected to the identity of its people.
The world has to feel like it existed before the audience arrived.
Tomi Adeyemi’s Imagination
At the center of the film is the imagination of Tomi Adeyemi, whose novel introduced readers to Orïsha in 2018.
Children of Blood and Bone became a major bestseller and established Adeyemi as one of the most significant new voices in young adult fantasy. The novel eventually became the first book in the Legacy of Orïsha trilogy.
For Prince-Bythewood, adapting that material meant respecting the imagination that made the original story resonate with readers while also finding the cinematic language necessary to make it work on a massive screen.
The director has spoken about Adeyemi with extraordinary admiration, calling the author a genius and emphasizing the depth of the world she created.
That admiration is important because worldbuilding begins with the person who imagined the world in the first place.
From Page to Screen
Adapting a novel as expansive as Children of Blood and Bone requires decisions about what can remain exactly as it appeared on the page and what must be transformed for cinema.
A novel can spend pages explaining a character’s thoughts or describing the history of a kingdom. A film has to communicate much of that information through images, performances, sound, movement, and atmosphere.
Prince-Bythewood’s approach places considerable emphasis on making the audience experience Orïsha rather than simply being told about it.
The result is a fantasy world designed to communicate through its visual details as much as through its dialogue.
Crafting an African-Inspired Fantasy
One of the most significant elements of the project is its cultural foundation.
Rather than building its visual identity around the familiar European traditions that have dominated much of mainstream fantasy cinema, Children of Blood and Bone draws inspiration from African cultures and the wider African diaspora.
That influence can be felt in the clothing, environments, movement, design, and mythology while still allowing Orïsha to exist as its own fictional world.
The objective is not to recreate one specific historical place. It is to create a fantasy culture that feels authentic to the influences from which it was inspired.
Fantasy becomes more powerful when its mythology has a cultural heartbeat.
The Importance of Location
The physical world surrounding the characters is just as important as the costumes or magical elements.
The production has utilized locations in South Africa and the Canary Islands to help create the landscapes of Orïsha. Those environments provide a physical scale that can be difficult to reproduce entirely inside a studio.
Mountains, coastlines, forests, open landscapes, and distinctive architecture become part of the story rather than simply serving as scenery.
For the audience, that physicality can make the fantasy feel more immediate. The characters are not simply moving through computer-generated backgrounds. They appear to inhabit a real place with its own geography.
Costumes That Tell a Story
Costume design also plays a crucial role in the creation of Orïsha.
Clothing is one of the fastest ways for an audience to understand a fictional society. It can reveal status, occupation, cultural identity, wealth, tradition, and even a character’s relationship to power.
In a world where magic has divided society, those visual distinctions become particularly meaningful.
The costumes therefore have to do more than make the characters look extraordinary. They have to help explain who these people are.
The Magic Has to Feel Real
Perhaps the most difficult element to translate from the novel is magic itself.
Magic can easily become a collection of visual effects. But in Children of Blood and Bone, it represents something much deeper. It is tied to identity, history, oppression, memory, and the relationship between generations.
That means the magical elements have to feel like part of the culture rather than an effect added to it.
The audience needs to understand why magic matters to the people of Orïsha before it can fully understand why restoring it is so important.
Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Vision
Prince-Bythewood has built much of her career around stories that place Black characters at the center of emotionally complex worlds.
From Love & Basketball to The Woman King, her work has repeatedly combined character-driven storytelling with a strong sense of place and physicality.
Children of Blood and Bone allows those interests to expand onto a much larger canvas.
Here, the filmmaker is working with an entire mythology, a large ensemble, extensive action, supernatural elements, and a fictional society that must feel coherent from the first frame to the last.
It is ambitious filmmaking, but the ambition begins with character.
The spectacle only matters if audiences care about the people living inside it.
Zélie at the Center
At the center of the story is Zélie, whose journey provides the emotional connection between the personal and the political.
Her fight to restore magic is also a fight to reclaim something that was taken from her people. That makes her journey larger than a conventional hero’s quest.
She is carrying the expectations of a community while trying to understand her own power.
The fantasy elements therefore become inseparable from the emotional story.
A New Fantasy Landscape
The arrival of Children of Blood and Bone represents something larger than another fantasy adaptation.
It offers audiences a chance to enter a fantasy world shaped by a different cultural imagination—one in which African-inspired mythology is not a side element but the foundation.
That gives the film an opportunity to expand the visual vocabulary of mainstream fantasy cinema.
It also demonstrates why worldbuilding matters. A memorable fantasy world does not simply give audiences somewhere to escape. It gives them another way to think about power, identity, history, and belonging.
From Genius to Cinema
Prince-Bythewood’s praise for Adeyemi ultimately points back to the source of the entire project.
Before there were landscapes, costumes, creatures, cameras, or visual effects, there was a writer imagining a kingdom that did not exist.
Adeyemi created Orïsha on the page. Prince-Bythewood is now translating that imagination into a visual language that millions of moviegoers will encounter.
That is the unusual challenge of adaptation: preserving the spirit of another artist’s imagination while giving it a new form.
If the world feels complete when audiences finally step inside it, the filmmakers will have accomplished something extraordinary.
Orïsha began as an idea on a page. Now it is waiting for an audience to walk through its gates.
Children of Blood and Bone is scheduled to arrive in theaters and IMAX in January 2027, bringing Adeyemi’s fantasy world to a scale the novel could only suggest.
For Gina Prince-Bythewood, the challenge is not merely to make a spectacular fantasy film.
It is to make audiences believe in Orïsha.
And if the worldbuilding succeeds, viewers will not simply watch the story unfold. They will feel as though they have entered a world that has been waiting for them all along.
Gina Prince-Bythewood brings the magical kingdom of Orïsha from Tomi Adeyemi’s bestselling novel to the big screen.
Maison Adoré • Film & TV • Fantasy • Culture
