Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: HBO signs on to adapt an award-winning series of fantasy novels, which are beloved by readers but difficult and expensive to adapt. Undaunted, a major cast is assembled—along with sets, costumes, and CGI elaborate enough to rival most blockbusters—in the hopes audiences will be so seduced that they’ll lose themselves in a complicated fantasy world for seasons and seasons to come. By the time the whole thing is over, maybe they’ll even bring home, I don’t know, about five dozen Emmys.

Sounding familiar? Yes, it’s clear that HBO hopes His Dark Materials, which premieres tonight, will enrapture the same audience that gobbled up Game of Thrones (or at least tide them over until House of the Dragon is ready). And with at least three novels by series creator Phillip Pullman to adapt—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, along with two more recently published books and some ancillary spinoff stories—there’s more than enough material for His Dark Materials to run for years.

But those with a sharp memory for Hollywood’s misbegotten blockbusters will be feeling some deja vu right now. We’ve been through a version of this before, in 2007, when a fantasy epic called The Golden Compass hit theaters to a wave of controversy and a mediocre box-office gross that snuffed out two planned sequels. Now, HBO—in collaboration with BBC One, where the show will air abroad—is bringing the same novel to TV, and hoping to achieve the success that eluded the movie both critically and commercially 12 years ago.

So: What went wrong last time around, and what’s different this time around? Watching His Dark Materials so soon after revisiting The Golden Compass gave me some unexpected sympathy for the movie, which is so misconceived it feels like it was deliberately set up to fail. If you squint, you can see why New Line thought The Golden Compass would make such an appealing prospect for a Lord of the Rings followup. It’s a series filled with fantastical wonders—shapeshifting animal companions, armored bears, witches—told through the eyes of Lyra, a headstrong adolescent child, whose age conveniently dovetails with the target audience.

Unfortunately for New Line, The Golden Compass is also a deceptively tricky book, using the trappings of children’s fantasy to deliver an anti-Christian allegory in the same way C.S. Lewis used The Chronicles of Narnia to deliver a pro-Christian allegory. I’m not being speculative here; the series has one character who says Christianity was "a very powerful and convincing mistake," and another who says, "Every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling."

It’s not the easiest sell to mainstream audiences now, and definitely not an easy sell in 2007. And while the movie doesn’t have a single line of dialogue that even vaguely resembles the quotes above, it still struggles to figure out what to do about the series’ innate atheism. In particular, you can feel The Golden Compass struggling to figure out what to do with the Magisterium, an evil and oppressive organization which is obviously based on the Catholic Church. The movie’s solution is to depict the Magisterium as a generic, vaguely Orwellian evil empire, with Lord of the Rings alum Christopher Lee at its head. (This diluted take on the Magisterium wasn’t enough for the Catholic League, which organized a boycott of the movie anyway.)