Commonality was found among historians Brian Taves and Ian Cameron in that the genre required a setting that was both remote in time and space to the film audience and that it contained a positive hero who tries to make right in their world.
Tasker found that most films in the genre featured narratives located within a fantasy world of exoticized setting, which are often driven by quests for characters seeking mythical objects or treasure hunting.
Critic André Bazin went as far to say in the 1950s that "there is not difference between Hopalong Cassidy and Tarzan except for their costumes and the arena in which they demonstrate their prowess.
[4] Taves wrote that "unlike adventure, fantasy presents a netherworld where events violate physical reality and the bounds of human possibility.
"[9] He described the style as not being a discrete genre in its own, but a flexible, overarching category that encompasses a range of different related narrative forms.
"[7] Tasker noted this specifically, that even when disregarding its historical setting, the film concerned a quest, with travel and developing moral sense of the hero's place in the world.
[12] For Taves, he compared the styles saying that adventure films were "something beyond action" and were elevated "beyond the physical challenge" and by "its moral and intellectual flavour.
Beyond being adaptations of famous books, Tasker said that the appeal of these films was also in their effects laden scene, finding The Lost World a "landmark of effects-led adventure cinema.
[22] In her study of King Kong, Cynthia Erb noted a conventions of both travel documentary and jungle adventure traditions.
The historical adventure film continued to be a popular Hollywood genre into the mid-1950s featuring various male stars such as Tyrone Power, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Burt Lancaster, and Stewart Granger.
[29] 1960s fantasy films such as Jason and the Argonauts (1963) combined the set-pieces and fantastic locations of historical adventures with renewed emphasis on special effects.
[29] By the 1970s, The Three Musketeers (1973) marked a point where the historical adventure has been firmly associated with what Tasker described as "comic - even camp - tone" that would inform later films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Mummy (1999), and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).
[31] While both genres took on challenging material, towards the late 1970s of an adventure style geared towards more family-oriented audiences with films like Star Wars (1977) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
[32] Star Wars exemplifies a resurgent adventure strand of the 1970s cinema with characters like the Jedi Knights who swing from ropes and wield light sabers recall sword-fighting and swashbuckling films.
[33] Tasker commented that this led to a commercially lucrative and culturally conservative version of the genre that would continue into the 21st century with film series like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean.