Paramount+ grabs its dice and Doritos, bails on live-action Dungeons & Dragons show

In a manner eerily reminiscent of that time we pissed off our DM, Brian Carter, while he was driving us back from a screening of the Tim Burton Planet Of The Apes movie in 2001—thus dooming Guldo The Dwarf, Davin The Wizard, and Torrid The Death Priest to a sudden, horrifying bout of abrupt non-existence—Paramount+ has announced that it’s bailing on its plans to make a live-action TV show set in the universe of Dungeons & Dragons. Details on the split—including who will be providing gas money, and whether Paramount+ will be allowed to keep the already-opened bag of Doritos, even though Janey’s mom actually paid for them—have yet to be revealed as we go to press.

Per Deadline, Hasbro, which owns the rights to D&D, is expected to try to shop the series around to other possible buyers. The series was initially announced back in January of 2023, back around the same time Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was building up steam on its journey to becoming one of the first actually good D&D adaptations to ever make it to mainstream audiences. Rawson Marshall Thurber, who’s mostly known as one of Dwayne Johnson’s go-to directors (on stuff like Skyscraper, Central Intelligence, and Red Notice) created this previous draft of the series, although Hasbro will apparently be recruiting a new party of creatives to try to tackle this particular quest for a second time.

Actual plot details about the live-action series are basically nil, although, we’re going to go out on a limb and assume that, at some point, a wizard was going to contemplate an orb. Dungeons & Dragons managed to have a pretty huge 2023, all told, despite Hasbro itself doing everything in its power to piss away any lingering goodwill the brand has built up; between Honor Among Thieves and video game adaptation Baldur’s Gate III, people have rarely been more ready for D&D-branded adventure—except, apparently, for Paramount+.