Maybe Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley can roll a critical hit with Dungeons & Dragons
Aux Features Film
We’ve been hearing about various attempts to make a good Dungeons & Dragons movie pretty much ever since that last bad Dungeons & Dragons movie, with famous mega-dork Joe Manganiello even going so far as to take a break from organizing his pocket protectors to write his own Dungeons & Dragons script. That was years ago, though, and in the time since then there has been very little actual movement on a Dungeons & Dragons movie (chalk it up to bad dice rolls). Paramount optimistically scheduled a Dungeons & Dragons movie for 2021, but it was not the one Manganiello wrote, and then just last year the studio started talking to Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay about taking on the role of Dungeon Master and guiding this thing through a (metaphorical) series of monster-filled mazes.
Now, McKay evidently failed his saving throw, because Deadline is reporting that Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are now “in discussions” to direct the movie. The two of them previously directed Game Night, which seems like it has some interesting implications about what this movie is going to be—as in, it might not be a straight fantasy epic, but something with more of a comedy twist. They also worked on Spider-Man: Homecoming, so they even have experience with this nerd crap that nerds like (we’re just kidding, please don’t tell Joe Manganiello to beat us up).
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1980 Open your mind.
Had that game. Never really figured it out. Also had the handheld LCD game.
Can’t wait. D&D is just the same as video games in movies, film makers all seem to think any development of the product stopped in 1984.
[Takes off Walkman headphones, through which can be heard blaring music that is apparently just a long metal guitar solo.]What?
Yeah, love when there’s a videogame in a modern setting and the sounds are all 8-bit Pew Pews.
The 2000 Dungeons and Dragons direct-to-video sequel, Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God, is in that rarefied company (which also includes Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever) in which the sequel is much, much better than the original. Still damning with faint praise, but D&D:WotDG is legit not awful.
To be fair, the first D&D movie is absolutely wonderfully entertainingly awful, and Jeremy Irons is having more fun in the bad guy role than about anyone else has ever had. It’s utter garbage, but it’s really fun utter garbage.
It also inspired hilariously ruthless reviews. I recall one online column that mentioned “the worst script this side of a Scroll of Felching.”
To be fair, IIRC, the script was based on the director’s homebrew D&D campaign.
Yikes! That’s not exactly helping the braintrust behind the movie look any better.
That movie was the first DVD my family ever purchased. It had Jeremy Irons and a Wayans brother!
My primary positive recollection of the film was that the mage was cute, but I think being in it destroyed her career. As a mage, obviously.
It’s just boring
The first D&D movie doesn’t get enough credit. It’s 100% the best translation of the average 12 year old’s Monty Hall campaign. It’s exactly what my friends and I did at that age. I’m not saying that’s good entertainment or anything….
Hollywood is bad at D&D because the core ethos is teamwork and cookie-cutter Hollywood fantasy epics are all about an individual hero’s journey.
The 2000 movie had a bit where they split the party with the line “no, he must do this alone”. Fuck that. That’s how you get a TPK situation.
Also because D&D is by its very nature vague and open-ended.
Every Marvel movie and movies like the Jumanji remake etc. would probably disagree.
I’m hoping they keep it pretty comedic. I’m not sure i could do a straight grim-dark DnD film.
You want a fun D&D movie? You make Minsc and Boo the protagonists and you can’t avoid having a good time.
Boo like the forest
As long as someone says, “Eh, time for a bit of the rough and tumble,” I’m sold.
So you’re saying Felicia Day should be in it?
If you do a D&D movie, you’re going to either let Felicia Day be in it or have to have security on constant guard to keep her from breaking onto the set and photobombing every scene instead.
Just make Acquisitions Inc. The Movie already. I mean, it’s right there.Or one of the many other live-play D&D podcasts that have a enough character and story to roll up into a movie and are also funny and irreverent.
We’re literally getting a Critical Role feature length cartoon and series next year.
..wha?I was surprised enough by the official Acquisitions Inc. sourcebook for 5e.
See – this is why at the time I found the utter lack of coverage here on on Kotaku strange.They did a Kickstarter a few months back – they asked for $750,000 for an episode of a cartoon that would cover some of the “lost” time between the stream…they got their first million in under an hour, and then it never stopped.In the end they raised over $11,000,000 – which is allowing them to bring the Briarwood arc to the screen, (as a feature/multi episode story), and also the new story they were planning.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/criticalrole/critical-role-the-legend-of-vox-machina-animated-s
If they somehow find a way to convince Tom Hanks to be in the movie for least a cameo I will se this movie regardless of how bad it is.
My mom had just seen that movie right before my 12th birthday, when my best friend slept over and brought his D&D stuff to introduce me to the game, so she was literally afraid that I might freak out or turn to satanism or something. Luckily, my friend was a really, really nice kid (and a Mormon), so that assuaged her fears a lot. But what a fear-mongering bullshit movie.
The book was even worse.
All I remember about that movie is that it ends w/Hanks in a mental institution. Doesn’t it?
I thought he committed suicide, or maybe I’m thinking of a different character. My memories of it are very funny. The only reason I paid any attention to it at all at the time was because Tom Hanks was my FAVORITE ACTOR. Yes, in 1982.
You must have been a huge Bosom Buddies fan.I mostly remember him as Alex P. Keaton’s drunk-ass uncle, or cousin, or something.
Yes, I was a gigantic Bosom Buddies fan when I was in 5th and 6th grade, and I adored Tom Hanks, so when he appeared later on Family Ties as the alcoholic uncle I was OVER THE MOON.
“Very fuzzy,” I meant to say, not “very funny”.
It’s funny how deep the anti-D&D thing went.In high school we had a games club(in the mid 90s) and when they formed it the one rule was that we were not allowed to play D&D. So we played Rifts, Shadowrun, Vampire, Werewolf and a whole much of other games that were arguably much more “mature” and “dark”. Seems kinda silly.
My cousin’s husband grew up in a strict Christian household that where he was expressly forbidden from playing D&D. So he played Palladium Fantasy, which is one of the most transparent D&D clones out there. Adults frequently gave a very limit understanding of their children’s interests.
Yep we played that in school as well. “We can’t play D&D so I found this game online called F.A.T.A.L. Can we play this?”“Sure whatever, I’m only here because I get an extra $50 a month to be a club supervisor”
I will always star a F.A.T.A.L reference.
And because you gave me a star, I give you the FATAL theme song. Once described perfectly on RPG.net as sounding like “Cookie monster falling down a stair case with a drum set”
The Dungeons and The Dragons: Neverwinter Drift
2 Dungeon 2 Dragon
D&D2:Electric Bugbearaloo
DnD3: Greater Electric Bugbearaboo
D&D 4: Air Elemental Bud
D&D 5: The Unicorn Ultimatum
D&D 6: Final Edition
D&D 7: Kobold & The Beautiful
D&D 8: Tiamat Takes Manhattan
D&D 9: Lolth, Queen of the Demonweb Pits vs Predator
Not “D8 of the Furious?”
Except . . . D&D is a game system, currently in its fifth edition. There isn’t a “D&D story” to adapt like there is for the MCU or Lord of the Rings, Sure, there are R. A. Salvatore’s Drizzt novels and such, but it’s not like this is specifically saying that, and this is about a “Dungeons and Dragons” movie. So . . . great? I mean, what that tells me is somebody will probably have a sword and somebody else will cast a spell and it could be literally anything else, and it’s just a marketing campaign to call it “D&D”.
There is tons to pull from, though. Dragonlance would be my dream but I think they’ll see Tass and scream “FRODO” and that’d be it for that.
YepHonestly wish someone with love for the novels and a good budget adapted the original Dragonlance chronicles
counterpoint: “the high-pitched, annoying voice of the Kender”
Tas serves his purpose through Chronicles. It’s a little frustrating that he becomes the conduit for all of the action in Legends. By the Chaos War, you’re wondering when he’ll finally die for good.And then he shows up in the War of Souls and helps that trilogy be nearly unreadable.Anyway, if they kept him as an actual character instead of some Jar-Jar comic relief bag of shit, he wouldn’t be too bad in Chronicles.
Yeah, but, instead of that, it’s going to be some Jumanji-type bullshit about some kids playing the game and getting sucked inside. Probably lighthearted and PG-13 humor as they try to figure out the rules of the new world they’re in. And there will be a hot girl who doesn’t fit in at all, but somehow got sucked along. And a nerdy girl who turns out to be secretly hot by taking off her glasses, letting her hair down and putting on a corset.
Honestly, it’s not D&D, but an adaptation of Kieron Gillen’s Die would work perfectly in that style.
Which is the core problem of a “D&D Movie” – it may be the most famous tabletop RPG, but nobody owns the rights to tabletop RPGs as a whole.
Then they realize the rules are more like guidelines… (The cheating character rerolls would take up half the film.)
More like Never-Ending Story. “IT’S THE POWER OF IMAGINATION!!!”
Which would require the “kids” to be a little older than, say, the kids in Stranger Things.(Also your description of the probable story, if you take D&D out of it, does sound a bit like Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed.)
All right. Teens. Hell, I’m old enough now that everyone under, say, 25 is a kid to me.
Yep!
Dragonlance has some potential, but it’d have to be adapted by someone who doesn’t love the novels toooo much. Otherwise the result would be like 3×3 hours of someone telling you about their tabletop campaign.
Yeah. I love the original DragonLance Chronicles and Legends trilogies, and the only adaptation so far is the animated movie with Kiefer Sutherland voicing Raistlin. I’ve tried to watch it 7 times and have never been able to sit through it.And I have a high tolerance for garbage. I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen at least 4 times in the theater for God’s sake (mostly due to various configurations of family members and kids that wanted to see it, but still…)
The first Dragonlance book I read was the prequel The Legend of Huma. I remember it being a pretty good standalone story. Maybe they could start with something like that and build up to the Chronicles if it succeeds.
Moreover, it’s not even a “shared universe.” D&D doesn’t work as a single film. It’s an anthology TV series. Hollywood? Do you hear me? It’s an anthology TV series – (or a series of one-off seasons, like AHS or The Terror.) Use the system to build out the episodes. That’s what it’s for.
Base it off the awesome 80s cartoon and I’m in. Venger’s going down!!
Related ish: Pirates of Dark Water would be great for a movie.
*long sigh*It’s disheartening in a world that has a competent adaptation of Lord of the Rings on film, and Game of Thrones on television (not to mention all the other things currently in production for TV), that in the last 30 years no one can seem to adapt to either, the most beloved fantasy IP on the planet.All they have to do is get some talent to write an adaptation of some of those classic module series, in one of the major campaign settings. It just seems like the suits or creatives overthink it, or just get in each others way, the last decade especially.
See the above poster. The problem is D&D isn’t a world or a story. It’s a game system. It’s also heavily influenced by LOTR. The problem is everyone who seems to try to adapt it seems to be writing an adaption of their own story when they should be looking at adapting books or stories already written around D&D. The Drizt books or Dragonlance. Honestly what could be cool is a anthology style TV series. Maybe every season changes settings. So the first season is the Forgotten Realms, then maybe Greyhawk, Dragonlance. If it gets really popular maybe we get a Dark Sun season.
That was my thought. The system isn’t the story, it’s the medium the stories are played through.It’d be like “XBox The Movie”Oh shit. They’re gonna make one now, aren’t they?
Here. Here.
Please no Spelljammer.
I kinda like Spelljammer
Curse of Strahd/Ravenloft as a Halloween special!
Considering how closely the settings of your first three imagined seasons hew to a planed-out, hackneyed pseudo-medieval-Europe fantasy world (and before anyone gets there: yes, Dragonlance too), I can’t imagine such a series doing much beyond prompting head-scratching among viewers and critics as to why the show keeps resetting its narrative with no substantial difference in context for it, completely unlike, say, American Horror Story.On the other hand, while it’s still far from a great idea (a D&D movie or TV show probably never will be), a studio might see some success if they started and stayed with something like Dark Sun, where the setting contains many pop-culture elements recognizable to general audiences from fantasy-IP saturation over the years, but with slight variations on those elements, a slightly less common setting and a genre-mash-up twist. Nothing frighteningly new, really, as most TV-junkie nerds aren’t into that, but enough to set the show apart.
Next you’re going to be telling me there isn’t a cohesive story behind emoji and emoticons and you couldn’t make a good movie about them.
Remember when Hollywood made a Doom movie without demons?
Tomb of Horrors movie would work for me.
Exactly..Or just imagine a movie trilogy or better yet a TV season(s) based on Descent Into the Depths of the Earth or Queen of the Spiders.Between the Drow, Lolth, and everything in between, that could be as epic as anything we’ve seen. The writers/directors just need to be the defacto adventure creators and DMs that actually existed for the pen and paper RPG. Just give me some good characters like we have in the Tolkien books or other great fantasy works to fill in for the PCs. Present it with the same level of gravitas as LOTR and it could be special.
That’s not really “all they have to do”. They also have to convert a game that can be played utterly devoid of dramatic weight (including even its most operatic modules), and a game that depends nearly completely on direct interactions among a small group of people to develop any, into an engaging drama. (It’d be the same thing if they wanted to make a comedy out of the material, for that matter.)Adapting a game, even a game with an associated narrative, is a far different beast from adapting a book or even adapting a book about a game like “Jumanji”. There is much less to go on, and as concerns your diehard early-adopter existing fans that will be responsible for word-of-mouth, there are so, so many more ways you can go wrong in their eyes, since the game is so many things to so many people.On top of that, the adaptation needs to set itself apart from a glut of pseudo-medieval fantasy media, something the D&D IP has never been good at, since much of its appeal is as a venue for an interactive experience derived from those other media. The best bet there would be to head directly into one of the D&D brand’s more striking genre mash-ups, such as Dark Sun or Spelljammer, something that can take advantage of D&D’s blatantly derivative nature while putting a mild, non-off-putting spin on old standbys (elves, dwarves, dragons, etc.) for nerd consumers.Really, any studio would be far better off grabbing one of the decently selling novel series attached to the game’s sub-brands and adapting that. But that would wreck one of the major benefits of optioning Dungeons & Dragons: you don’t have to deal with a pesky novelist, their contract, their public statements, etc., just a corporate IP owner whose interests lie solely with your project’s commercial success.
I agree with some of your points but didn’t want to write five paragraphs in an effort to be concise initially, to what exactly they’d have to do. It’s an adaptation, so no kidding they would have to change some things, expand some things, and drop some others. That goes without saying and I was being a bit hyperbolic and cheeky when I said “all they have to do”.I disagree with you though that the modules couldn’t be more easily adapted than say a novel, since their format is practically two-thirds a script formatically . You have most of the side characters, antagonists, and set pieces ready to go. Like I said in another post you’ll need to fill in the protagonists and I think this is one of the major advantages for a D&D adaptation. Unlike a novel, they writers/creators have cart blanche to make them any of the races, genders, leads, side kicks, etc.. Without needing to worry about angering people about not getting the right actor for a character that’s already imagined from a novel, comic, or other work.I also don’t think they have to make an effort to distance themselves from all the influences that originally came together to form D&D. Gygax pulled from all that for a reason, people love that stuff. Mashed all together made it greater than it’s parts. Just look at the original trilogy that were the Star Wars movies. Lucas borrowed from everything under the sun going back to Homer. It didn’t make that original series of movies any less loved. I t just has to be good, period. Everyone is free to have their opinion and I think there are many ways it could go and be good. I just just think my suggestion could be an easier path if, and it’s a big if, all the other variables come through.
Community-related snarky comment, draft #1:
reads articleIf that’s sarcasm I can’t tell because everything in this game is silly.
Community-related snarky comment, draft #2:
If this helps keep Fat Neil alive, I’m all for it.
I’m really shocked that a modern big budget action adventure movie is going to lean towards comedy over drama or action.
Unless you’re going to adapt the novels like Dragonlance or a campaign like RavenloftI don’t see the point of using the D&D license. Why not just make a no name fantasy movie? Though I’d love to de something from Dragonlance or Ravenloft. Hell, you can do the former then the latter then combine them both since what’s his face – one of the main bad guys – went to Ravenloft.
Lord Soth (I can’t remember where I put my car keys half the time, yet somehow I can remember that). Decent villain, and you’re right, the Dragonlance/Ravenloft cinematic universe is right there. Hollywood’s going to make Strahd sparkly, though.
Yeah, but, if they slap together some random bullshit (probably a discarded plot from the kevin sorbo hercules that somebody forgot to throw away that they just add some dragons and wizards to and hope nobody notices), and put the D&D name on it, they’ve got a built in audience that they don’t have to worry as much about paying for marketing. Even if it’s utter shit, there’ll be news coverage of nerds freaking out about their childhood being raped and news is free publicity. That’s why they do this shit.
I mean that didn’t happen the first couple of times.
Like when the makers of those bootleg Conan dolls got a Cease and Desist so they changed out the heads and VIOLA!, He-Man was born! Do a cheapo cartoon to serve as an ad-hoc advertisement to move the things… Stuff sells itself!
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Wait. Lance Sweets is a director now?
It does make sense that Sam Weir is directing a D&D movie.
Lets just hope this Jew isn’t in to ruin things.
We’re already getting an awesome D&D film/series next year:
You’re not wrong. Also, if a hypothetical D&D movie hired Matt Mercer as a narrator or similar, I’m there.
They can do wonders with mocap, he could play everyone.
The problem with every D&D movie is that they don’t understand what to do with the vast amount of material given and they think they have to fit everything into the movie. Yet they don’t know what “everything” consists of.
You don’t have to have all the races represented. You don’t always fight a dragon or an evil magic user or a tyrant. Just go simple.A group of 4 adventurers and an old man with a map.Essentially Indiana Jones & friends style in a D&D setting.
They should probably not try to do this
How about they just make a Shadowrun movie, using tropes of the Tolkien fantasy world (orcs, elves, wizards, monsters, etc.), but with a sci-fi twist? It’s not popular enough to get a bunch of fanboy backlash if it’s not 100% faithful, it’s just different enough, but familiar enough for non-fans to get on board, plus lasers, the internet, and an opportunity for a diverse cast without it seemed forced.