Michelle Rodriguez and Justice Smith fill out character sheets for the Dungeons & Dragons movie
Aux Features Dungeons & Dragons
Back in December, Chris Pine signed on to star in a Dungeons & Dragons movie for Paramount and eOne, with neither party taking the important step to explain if this was going to be some kind of fantasy epic like the last D&D movie or a Jumanji-style thing about people getting sucked into the world of their tabletop game. Now we know two of the people joining Pine’s party (that’s a D&D thing!): The Hollywood Reporter says Michelle Rodriguez and Justice Smith have joined the cast, but again, we don’t know who they’re playing. Are they elves and/or wizards and/or fighters? Or are they nerds playing a game who get transported to a fantasy world? We need to know!
That’s all the new information we have about this, but if you don’t know what D&D is, THR explains that it’s known for its “war games, treasure hunts, camaraderie, and reversals of fortune,” which manages to make it sound less fun than it should. The movie is coming from Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who previously directed Game Night. As for Rodriguez and Smith, she’s in the Fast And Furious movies and he’s Detective Pikachu’s friend. Together, they are… two people who may or may not be nerds and/or cool fantasy rogues in this movie. We would really like to know what this movie is about!
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Who’s playing the Gelatinous Cube?
That kind of thing is only available on OnlyFans, sorry.
Colin Farrell
Judging by his recent appearance in a Super Bowl ad, I assume it’s Mike Myers.
It was the role Kevin Smith had been waiting a lifetime for, but he got bored waiting.
… with neither party taking the important step to explain if this was going to be some kind of fantasy epic like the last D&D movie or a Jumanji-style thing about people getting sucked into the world of their tabletop game. Uh… Don’t you mean a D&D-style about people getting sucking into the world of the tabletop game?
I really gotta think they are gonna go with a meta Jumanji-style thing here rightJust making a straight fantasy movie and slapping D&D on it would just feel lazy. Sadly the D&D settings that they seem to want to push these days are the fairly generic fantasy worlds and unless they are adapting specific stories or characters a movie based on them would just look and be like any other fantasy movie.A meta thing where they are transported to the world or some such would be a fun take
That’s too bad since they’ll miss their chance to build fascinating scenes about drawing maps on quadrille lined paper.
You are describing the exact reason I didn’t lose my virginity until my 20s
They did release a Players Guide to Eberron a year ago. But in all likelihood they’ll set it in Forgotten Realms.
Eberron is okay but not my favorite. I’d love to see Dark Sun. If they were going to adapt an actual D&D book series of vote Dragonlance but I know that most likely it would end up being the Drizt stuff that gets a movie
They did do that godawful Dragons of Autumn Twilight straight-to-video cartoon with Kiefer Suterland as Raistlin back in 2008. I can watch a lot of crap, but I’ve never been able to get past the first encounter with bad CGI Draconians in that. It’s just so, so bad…
Oh yeah. It’s terrible.
D & D strikes me as like Battleship where your two choices are to make it so generic that it’s basically a Lord of the Rings knock-off/generic “Navy men on boats” movie or so specific that it’ll be weird and potentially alienating to non-fans.
Personally, I think the second sounds more entertaining.
Here’s how I imagine Battleship was pitched:Exec 1: Hey, I got an idea for something we could adapt into a movie: Battleship.Exec 2: The board game?Exec 1: Yeah, why not? People love it.Exec 2: But it’s just picking coordinates on a grid to sink these plastic toy ships. How do you make that into a movie?Exec 1: You’re right, we’d need to add something. Lets think of some other things everyone loves…..aliens…..robots…..ALIEN ROBOTS!
The property needs a fun metanarrative twist, because otherwise we’re just talking about another bland, uninspired LotR knock-off (quite literally, in this case.) Stats and dice rolls being a part of it would be a big help, but I’m hard pressed to figure out how to make that work. At the very least you need the heroes to have an active, playfully antagonistic relationship with an omniscient DM character who delights in pulling the rug out from under the party repeatedly, but just as often finds that the party has put them into a position they never saw coming and they’re forced to improvise.
To me, portal fantasy seems like the laziest version of this movie. I guess I’ve seen the ‘80s D&D cartoon, read Narnia and Guardians of the Flame, and seen one of the Jumanji movies, and having players suddenly end up in the fantasy land doesn’t seem all that compelling.I’m also tired of naïve audience surrogate characters, which portal fantasy loves. We’re savvy consumers of media. Even muggles have seen The Witcher and Game of Thrones and maybe played some Skyrim. We understand fantasy lands. We don’t need a bewildered tween protagonist to whom the denizens can explain the magic world.
For my sins, I’d still like to see a live action version of the 80’s cartoon series. Sure it risks being generic, but there enough there for it to be interesting. Even if that’s just a nostalgia vibe for us 80’s kids.
Someone posted this last week on another D&D story (was it you?).
It’s very good and basically the live action version of the cartoon that I’d want to see.
It was probably me. Since The AV Club and Gizmodo insist on running 75% of the same content and running similar articles multiple times, I lose track of these things.It really is the perfect adaptation. It’s the characters I remember. Nobody has gone and updated the costumes or stuffed them into 5th edition roles. The tone is the right mix of serious and goofy, and it has Tiamat and Venger. Filmmakers should take notes.
Yeah totally, it’s the right tone and they look like the cartoon characters. For some reason Hollywood can’t or won’t make it, which is disappointing to say the least.
My issue is that so much of D&D, by its very nature, is just a hunch if generic fantasy worlds designed to be toy boxes for players adventures. If you want to make a great fantasy movie then adapt one of the million great fantasy books or maybe your own unique world to stand out. If you want to make a movie and call it D&D, I just feel like the meta narrative of it being a game should be part of the movie. Obviously they could maybe adapt one of the good D&D based novel series or one of the very unique world(such as Dark Sun or Spelljammer) but I feel like they are not doing either of those.
I think I’d be OK with it being portal fantasy if it meets the following conditions:NO naïve audience surrogates. The people who port over to the fantasy realm need to be gamers who understand the world and are excited about being in it, at least for a while. They can decide they want to go home when the danger becomes too real. No one gets to bring along the whiny kid sibling who doesn’t understand anything and wants to go home all the time.The party ported over is instrumental to the story, like a wizard brings them there to do something as part of a larger plan. They are NOT, however, “the chosen ones.”There’s obvious leveling. If there’s no leveling, it’s not D&D. The people ported over become low-level versions of their characters and have to fumble their way through learning how to be heros.
i have literally never met anybody else who had read the Guardians of the Flame series. A little rapey for the inevitable 15 year olds who’d be drawn to it in 1988, but it was the 80s, traumatizing children was part of creating new realms of future psychology.
It’s been so long since I read any of them that I’d forgotten any rapes. Curiously, the only thing I remember is that the dwarf’s high Constitution was explained by saying that his muscle mass was so dense that he could not float or swim.
The “Rick and Morty vs Dungeons and Dragons” comic book hit the perfect sweet spot of combining a meta take on D&D with an actual story. They got into some pretty deep references that could have alienated casual fans, but built a decent fantasy story on top of character motivations from the Rick and Morty characters and you had something for everyone.Basic plotline is Morty finds out Jessica plays D&D and pretends he is a veteran player and then gets invited to sit in with her group, so Morty has to go to Rick for an emergency tutorial on D&D before the game night. Rick starts out by having Morty sit in with some of his 50-something friends playing 1st Edition rules in their garage before revealing to Morty that he was essentially hazing and toughening him up by playing a game “where the magic-user can only cast one spell before needing to sleep for eight hours”. He then works his way through the editions with VR science/magic and eventually the whole family is placed in an alternate D&D dimension. Rick is a min/maxer who treats the game as a problem to be solved and mocks any attempts at role-playing, where the rest of the family is more interested in creating and playing out alternate versions of themselves and being heroic. The Dungeon Master ends up being brought forth as a real entity, kind of like the old cartoon, and forces Rick into being a halfling bard, a class he has relentlessly mocked up to that point. Hijinks ensue.
Check out the webseries “AFK” which was a crowd-funded (and then partially TVNZ-funded) series filmed here in New Zealand. It involves people waking up as their characters from an online fantasy game. It is surprisingly good for a pretty low-budget series.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK8cghs2w_n6L8OunC-BFLQ
look, i still own that original roller-coaster, they KNOW i still have the roller-coaster, i am pretty sure they have my yahoo address, they can go make like an Treant and Animate a tree and leave.
Question. Where was that roller coaster anyways and, like, did everyone who ride it go to the D&D world? I’ve looked through old news stories and never saw an article titles “Six Flags closed after thousand disappear on new Dungeons and Dragons roller coaster”
it wasn’t bound to any one single park, it moved aound. And yes, every carload would end up in the Realm of Dungeons and Dragons, it’s why i wouldn’t run more than two or three car a month
Will they be rolling characters via just a straight 3d6, or giving themselves an edge with 4d6, dropping the lowest die?
I dont know the history of these writers and producers with the game, but they really should reach out to the medium that has really brought D&D to the masses in recent years, and brought it back into the popular spotlight. I know actual-play Podcasts arent the same as writing a movie, but man reaching out to some of these creative minds I think would go a long way. You have the Dimension 20 crew with BL Mulligan, NADDPOD with Murph, and of course Critical Role with Matt Mercer. Even tapping into the wealth of hollywood players that are D&D nerds such as Debrah Ann Wohl and Joe Mangienello would give me some more hope. I dont know the correct way to fully make a D&D movie work, well I would even say a movie sounds like a bad idea versus a serialized TV show. Campaigns take so many hours, now I am going to ramble, you cant do this in a MOVIE. But if you are, at least consult with some of the brilliant players out there in the D&D entertainment world.
play Podcasts aren’t the same as sitting around a table in your parent’s basement wearing a floppy wizard hat, working with your highschool friends to decipher the runic map of all things you won from a gnome enchantress in a game of tic tac toe. That stuff there’s the heart and soul of D&D.
What characters in D&D wear tank tops though?
Going by most fantasy art, any female character.
Do you not know what a tank top is?
Physically and emotionally abusive, alcoholic centaur warriors who can’t get a FUCKING GUILD SPOT because all the gods-damned PANSEXUAL LIBERAL SATYRS came here and TOOK ALL THE GOOD JOBS, VICKI, so cut me SOME FUCKING SLACK!
I looked for centaurs wearing a tank top in google images, didnt find any. But I did find this amazing fleece blanket.
I did not realize Rob Liefeld worked in the medium of fleece. I also did not realize I needed this blanket until this very moment.
Any top worn by a Fighter with high strength and constitution rolls is presumably a tank top.
Tanks, I guess.
Okay. This Michelle Rodriguez picture is hilarious.“Wear this dress. Yes, wear it. Now smile.”
Yeah that dress is definitely wearing her.
So, can we all agree that there’s a roughly 327% chance that this movie will be terrible?
I admit to not playing since the early nineties but I don’t remember this being one of the modules. Maybe it was the sequel to Temple of Elemental Evil.
I hope Chris Perkins makes a cameo.