The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010) on Netflix

PG20101h 49mAction Adventure Family Fantasy

In modern-day Manhattan, the sorcerer Balthazar Blake hunts the sorcerers who would free Morgana le Fay. He needs Merlin's heir, and a physics student named Dave Stutler is the one.

Netflix3.8/5
IMDb6.1/10177,949 votes
Rotten Tomatoes40%

Trailer

Watch the trailer on YouTube

Plot summary

Merlin's apprentices Balthazar Blake, Veronica Gorloisen and Maxim Horvath serve the old sorcerer until Horvath sides with Morgana le Fay. Morgana seeks a spell called the Rising, which would revive dead sorcerers and enslave mankind. Veronica draws Morgana's soul into her own body, and Balthazar imprisons both inside the Grimhold, a magical nesting doll, then sets out to find Merlin's descendant, the Prime Merlinean, who alone can defeat Morgana. In 2000, in a Manhattan antique shop, Balthazar gives ten-year-old Dave Stutler a dragon figurine that turns into a ring and reveals Dave as the Prime Merlinean. Balthazar and Horvath battle over the Grimhold and are sealed in an ancient Chinese urn for ten years. Ten years on, Dave is a physics student at NYU, and Balthazar comes looking for his apprentice.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2010)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

On 4 May 2009, while being filmed for a chase scene, a Ferrari F430 crashed through the window of a Sbarro restaurant in Times Square, injuring two pedestrians, one of them struck by a falling lamppost. Filming resumed the next night, when another accident occurred; both were blamed on rain making the roads slick.
The basic idea for the film was mostly Nicolas Cage's, who wanted to explore a mystic world and play a character with magical powers, and following a suggestion by his producer friend Todd Garner he decided to make a feature-length movie based on the Fantasia segment of the same name.
The story is adapted from the 1940 Disney Fantasia segment featuring Mickey Mouse, which in turn is based on the late-1890s symphonic poem by Paul Dukas, itself derived from the 1797 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ballad.
The filmmakers emphasised practical, on-set effects to make the magic more believable, making real fire with fluids or flash powder for colored flames, and having the actors wear gloves with LED displays to provide a lighting reference for the plasma bolts before the computer-generated shots were added.
In July 2010, Parade magazine listed The Sorcerer's Apprentice at number one on its list of "Worst Box Office Disasters of 2010 (So Far)".