Red Notice director Rawson Marshall Thurber to develop a Dungeons & Dragons TV universe
Thurber will "oversee" this version of Dungeons & Dragons, if only there were a term for that kind of thing
Aux News Rawson Marshall Thurber
Fresh off of the Netflix hit Red Notice, a movie that didn’t sound all that great but definitely had three major stars who could all appear in the auto-playing trailer thing, director Rawson Marshall Thurber is ready to roll the dice on his next project: overseeing a “flagship live-action television series” based on Dungeons & Dragons. That’s from Deadline, which says Thurber will write and direct the pilot for this flagship fantasy show—with “multiple buyers” apparently interested in getting involved.
The project is produced by eOne and new owner Hasbro, and Deadline says the plan is for Thurber’s show to “serve as a cornerstone” of the D&D TV universe as it “continues to expand.” One might point out that cinematic universe’s getting ahead of themselves never work out, though this one is specifically based on television, so maybe this will fare better than the Dark Universe did.
That’s about all we know, though Deadline does helpfully point out that Thurber grew up “at the height of D&D’s popularity in the 1980s—as depicted in Stranger Things.” You know the ‘80s, right? The decade from Stranger Things? What Deadline does not helpfully point out is what this means for all of the other Dungeons & Dragons things in the works, specifically the TV show that John Wick’s Derek Kolstad was attached to a year ago.
That might still be in the works, since Hasbro and eOne want a whole Dungeons & Dragons TV universe before they even finish the first campaign, or maybe it’s the same project and Thurber is taking it to the next stage. There’s also the movie with Chris Pine that’s supposedly still happening, but that was pre-quar and life has changed a lot since then. It’s been hard to get everybody’s D&D groups together lately that that one might’ve fallen apart.
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Dodgeball was a pretty funny movie.
Don’t make Netflix the DM… they’re really going to push for a 13 episode campaign, even if there’s not enough material for it.
“Ooh, everyone finally reached level 5 and got some bitchin’ new spells — love that Fireball, Steve — but viewership typically declines after two seasons, so … who’s up for a Traveller series?”
“Okay, so in the first episode of Traveller, all the characters die before they can do anything. Just like the game!”I fucking adore Traveller, though. I’d watch a show about spreadsheets any day.
I feel like Paranoia is the best tabletop property to make a Netflix series out of.
That’s because YOU’RE THE CLONE.
Apple+’s After Party feels very much like the creative team that could make Paranoia work as a TV series. And how expensive could the Paranoia license even be?
I never got past designing a spaceship, and yet that was a very enjoyable summer!
So that’s what Archmage of the Aether has been doing for the past few years.
Do you remember Archmage of the Aether?Pepperidge Farms remembers!
stop posting under your wife’s account, arch
Xenu, Kirk Cameron Left Me Behind, starz, Zodiac MF… I miss all you gals/guys.
Who gets to play coked out Gary Gygax?
There’s also the movie with Chris Pine that’s supposedly still happening, but that was pre-quar and life has changed a lot since then.
Uh, there were a ton of set photos and photos of the actors in their costumes this past fall. It’s probably getting close to releasing a trailer, Sam.
Yeach it wrapped filming in the late summer. Or at least the Northern Ireland parts of it did.
How to do a D&D cinematic/tv universe:1. Animated. Everything will look better. Trust me.2. A five episode mini-series with each episode about a different party member.3. A movie about that party getting together and kicking ass.That’s it. It isn’t hard.
Amazon has one it’s pretty good actually
As long as Marlon Wayans is stunt cast in this we’ll be sitting pretty.
i didn’t see it, but that movie looked like an AI-scripted nightmare. was i wrong?
That Vox Machina thing is the D&D-iest adaptation of any D&D thing ever, even if it’s in a non-union Mexican equivalent of the Forgotten Realms. The barbarian gets drunk, the bard sings a song about his balls, the brooding half-elf rogue weeps over a dying child, then everyone fights a dragon.
Which edition and will there be a comical bard. Please let there be a comical bard.
“Thurber grew up “at the height of D&D’s popularity in the 1980s—as depicted in Stranger Things.”Pretty sure the ‘80s was the height of D&D’s notoriety, now is the height of its popularity.
I’d nominate Mazes and Monsters (1982) as a watershed moment. For those who haven’t seen it, it portrays fantasy RPGs as being for damaged losers who get obsessive about their favorite game, and then it destroys their lives. It is based on a rushed novel which was based on inaccurate sensationalist newspaper articles about a Michigan State University student who attempted and then succeeded at suicide, and who also happened to play D&D (in the end, there was no connection at all, but it was reported differently).Then I would nominate Skullduggery (1983) for making fantasy RPGs an official part of the growing Satanic moral panic. Skullduggery shows a fantasy RPG as being the gateway for the Devil turning someone into a serial killer.Fantasy in general has also been rightly criticized for how it deals with issues like different sentient humanoid “races”, gender, national origin, sexuality, and so on. But that is mostly a more recent conversation, and not at all limited to fantasy RPGs.So my sense is the social/psychological/cultural attitudes captured by Mazes and Monsters and Skullduggery were most relevant to fantasy RPGs in that era. Interestingly, though, while the broader perception of fantasy RPGs might have turned more negative, my understand is sales of the Basic Set increased dramatically around the same time. Which goes to show that notoriety is not always a complete negative.And while the controversy about the race/gender/national-origin/sexuality/etc. continues to play out, I would tend to agree these other negative characterizations of fantasy RPGs have largely died down to at most marginal levels.
Yeah thankfully most of us ‘80s kids grew up knowing that the Satanic Panic thing was really dumb and that D&D wasn’t a gateway to anything except fun. Lots of my friends have their kids playing D&D these days and it’s not looked upon as a bad thing anymore, which is kinda strange for those of us who have been playing for 20+ years.As far as the ‘race’ thing, my take on it is that people are REALLY CONFUSED about the differences between races and species. Elves and dwarves, for example, are not at all the same race, they’re entirely different species. It’s like arguing that it’s not fair that your cat is more agile than your dog, the dog is never gonna be a cat and an elf is never gonna be a dwarf.
I think the problem with that explanation is that they are still all sentient humanoids, and in fact are sometimes portrayed as capable of interbreeding (lots of half-whatevers in D&D). Interbreeding would typically mean they were in fact the same species.And even without the point about interbreeding, the very idea that sentient humanoids could have systematic moral and intellectual differences that are genetic in nature is a very close analog to certain common racist attitudes. And it gets even worse when you start telling quasi-religious “creation” stories about how these different groups came to be, which again has unfortunate real world analogs.Now if it is kept strictly to the physical, OK. There is nothing particularly problematic about different subspecies having somewhat different physical characteristics, particularly if that involves plausible stories about environments and natural selection.But those moral and intellectual differences are something I personally think fantasy is well rid of.
Elves and Dwarves can’t interbreed, just like cats and dogs can’t. Elves and Orcs can breed with Humans, that’s it, and that’s fantasy world logic which is not applicable to real life in any way.
“And it gets even worse when you start telling quasi-religious “creation” stories about how these different groups came to be, which again has unfortunate real world analogs.”Drow are almost all evil because they’re raised in an evil society that worships an evil god in a world where gods are actually real and walk the land. I can’t think of a single real world analogy to that.“But those moral and intellectual differences are something I personally think fantasy is well rid of.”Your average Elf being smarter than your average human is perfectly logical since Elves don’t mature until halfway through a human’s lifetime. Your average Drow being morally different from your average human is perfectly logical since, again, evil society run by evil god in a world where gods are very real and everyone knows it.
Acting like Elves and Dwarves are the same species and they’re both the same as, say, Dragonborn, is nonsense. They’re going to have different starting physical characteristics just like a dog and a person are going to have different starting physical characteristics.
The real problem was calling them ‘races’ to begin with, now that people are bad with subtleties that’s causing issues.
So I think of Thurber as an OK comedy director. Red Notice was awful, but movies like Dodgeball, We’re the Millers, and Central Intelligence were basically competent, albeit not exactly special. Skyscraper was a little more action and less comedy . . . and not that good. Mysteries of Pittsburgh was by far his most serious movie, and also by far the worse (even worse than Red Notice, because at least Red Notice wasn’t ruining an underlying IP that should have made for an excellent movie).Long story short, I am not exactly filled with confidence about this. I think humor should be part of a D&D universe, but if it is all light comedies, then I don’t see it being very gripping. And I am not sure Thurber can actually do anything else even competently.
Showrunning is a different gig than directing. Maybe he’s better at identifying who can realize his vision than pulling it off himself. That’s true of a lot of managers.
It would be cool if they had multiple series set in the same world, so the same sets/locations and supporting actors (AKA NPC’s) could be used in each. Every series should start in the same tavern.