I remember the DnD Movie that was pretty bad, and just found out there was a sequel "The Wraith of the Dragon God" that had next to no money put into it. Anyway I'm out of the loop a little bit and with the popularity of the games resurgence I was wondering if there has been any more talk of another DnD movie?
If they do, it should focus on a specific event rather than the D&D title. It annoys me that Amazon is milking the Tolkien genre when they have The Wheel of Time already. At least if it was a DnD setting it would be less saturated.
I think the problem with DnD is that there's too much content to keep continuity, it's designed to be an open template for everything, so they could very well just make an original story.
Ultimately, I'd prefer some Brandon Sanderson adaptations before DnD though, IDK how good the content for DnD is, but Sanderson is golden.
I am encouraged by the cast that this will be a well produced product, but it depends on the script how "DnD" it is vs just a generic fantasy movie. Personally I hope there are no dragons but they fight a Beholder which to me is the definitive unique DnD monster.
I also hope at some point a party member dies, and in the next scene the same actor returns playing a new character.
D&D is a ruleset, and a setting perhaps. It makes no sense to make a "D&D Movie" - It makes sense to make a movie to tell a story however.
It makes sense, and dollars and cents, if you own a brand and you want to use that brand to rake in revenue by any means necessary. Box office could boost book sales, in the world of brand owning and dollars and cents being the sense, it's called synnergy.
I am encouraged by the cast that this will be a well produced product, but it depends on the script how "DnD" it is vs just a generic fantasy movie. Personally I hope there are no dragons but they fight a Beholder which to me is the definitive unique DnD monster.
The movie is called Dungeons and Dragons ... so if the word gets out there's no dragon .... But yes, a Beholder would be cooler than yet another CGI dragon. Maybe it turns out a Beholder is controlling or otherwise employing the dragon, that'd be cool.
I also hope at some point a party member dies, and in the next scene the same actor returns playing a new character.
I don't think they could do this with a movie, but if they went a TV series route, and did sorta the American Horror Story ensemble thing, you could do that, and even a TPK gimmick once and a while ... actually this sounds like a good "two part" series for AHS. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if AHS did tackle TTRPG as a theme at some point.
As long as it's a bit better than this effort to cash in (not an official D&D film but we all know the title would have been different if D&D wasn't a think in 1984):
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'd love to see D&D as an anthology series... maybe the gimmick could be that the stories are all adapted from the writers'/directors' personal play sessions. It's not uncommon for people to adapt stories from games they've played into other mediums. For example, the Vin Diesel film "The Last Witch Hunter" is inspired by a character he plays in D&D.
That said... yeah, I don't know if D&D as a generic title really works for a standalone film. It's certainly a franchise with a rich history of storytelling, but part of its appeal is that the stories are so diverse. Even two groups playing through the same Adventure Book will have entirely different stories at the end.
I suppose the smart thing might be to adapt one of the books or something, but at that point it works better to have the word "Dungeons and Dragons" be like... the franchise name while the individual movies are denoted by their subtitle.
AHS Season 11 "Meta." Clear performance difference between PCs and NPCs. NPCs actually pop up sometimes within same episodes in different roles. PCs do die off and first half ends in a TPK, with party reconstituted in second half in new roles, so each main actor plays two PCs and an actual player. There's gotta be some sorta menace to the actual players though ... plus AHS legal probably has to do some sort of buffer against litigation from the publishers or creators of the DIE comic series since from what I've seen of it it's the best rendering of TTRPG players and player characters probably since She Kills Monsters, especially if the series wraps up with a philosophical conversation with an otherwise uncaring d20.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
"You want to check out that Dungeons and Dragons movie?" "Yeah, sure, I never played, but curious what they made of the movie."
"You want to check out this Greyhawk movie?" "What? I heard there isn't even a pigeon in it, let alone a grey hawk."
"You want to check this Forgotten Realms movie?" "...."
Dungeons and Dragons means something, it has cultural cachet beyond the player base. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, I'm pretty sure there are D&D players who think they know quite a bit about the game that haven't heard of the former and may not even realized the published adventures for the most part are set in the latter.
No one's going to make any association between this Dungeon and Dragons and Jeremy Irons walks onto the set of Dungeons and Dragons years ago to any more of a degree than folks wanting to see the new Dune are going to associate it with David Lynch Alan Smithee's work.
Honestly I think the D&D fanbase ought to look at what love Bay's Transformers (hi Hasbro!) paid or served that toy's fans if you want to see how much attention the movie is really giving those who "really know" the brand. It took the Transformers fandom some time to really except Bay's movies as the standard bearer, quite a few still don't. Yet those movies do phenomenally well compared to other efforts to get big robots the spotlight on the big screens.
Or heck look at what Disney did with either Marvel (oversimplification of dense lore) or Star Wars (there were how many decades of lore attached to ... nah, we'll get around to calling them Legends maybe and maybe port them back in on the flip side, but we're going back to the movies as if none of that were there.
Movie won't change anyone's game. Might make a few more people curious about it.
Dungeons and Dragons means something, it has cultural cachet beyond the player base.
And it'll be recognizeable, I'm sure. There's all sorts of ways to play the game and it's all D&D, but I expect the movie to be heroic (heroes against their will, maybe, but no anti-heroes) fantasy, with a group of 4-5 heroes (with an identifiable warrior, thief, mage and healer), set in a faux-medieval western setting and, while human-centric, featuring elves and dwarves. That may seem like pretty generic fantasy flick fare, but it's really not. For moviegoers who know D&D, it'll look and feel like a standard D&D's campaign setup.
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"You want to check out that Dungeons and Dragons movie?" "Yeah, sure, I never played, but curious what they made of the movie."
"You want to check out this Greyhawk movie?" "What? I heard there isn't even a pigeon in it, let alone a grey hawk."
"You want to check this Forgotten Realms movie?" "...."
Dungeons and Dragons means something, it has cultural cachet beyond the player base. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, I'm pretty sure there are D&D players who think they know quite a bit about the game that haven't heard of the former and may not even realized the published adventures for the most part are set in the latter.
No one's going to make any association between this Dungeon and Dragons and Jeremy Irons walks onto the set of Dungeons and Dragons years ago to any more of a degree than folks wanting to see the new Dune are going to associate it with David Lynch Alan Smithee's work.
Honestly I think the D&D fanbase ought to look at what love Bay's Transformers (hi Hasbro!) paid or served that toy's fans if you want to see how much attention the movie is really giving those who "really know" the brand. It took the Transformers fandom some time to really except Bay's movies as the standard bearer, quite a few still don't. Yet those movies do phenomenally well compared to other efforts to get big robots the spotlight on the big screens.
That's because prior to Bumblebee (which wasn't really a Michael Bay movie as he wasn't the director), the Transformers films weren't aimed at fans of the franchise. They were aimed at general audiences.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I feel somewhat alone in thinking we need more generic fantasy movies. We get so many generic action movies and generic sci-fi movies, but very few people actually do sword and sorcery, and when they do, nobody actually tries to make it good because they've already written it off because for some reason Hollywood doesn't take fantasy seriously as a genre.
D&D is a ruleset and not a setting, but there are plenty of official settings with more than enough established lore that an officially branded movie could be set in. Of course if they set a film in the Forgotten Realms and didn't focus on or at least include a cameo by a certain drow there would be massive fanboy rage, but even writing a script along the framework of one of the numerous published campaign modules (or a new plot with similar structure) fleshed out with some decently written and acted characters could be a quality flick.
The biggest problem I see with the original and much derided D&D movie was not that they set it in a world that was made up specifically for the movie (at least I'm not aware of any pre-existing content there) but that they tried to cram in a bunch of cliched in jokes that at best got some light chuckles and generally confused or just sailed past non-players (like the dwarf loudly interjecting about hairy women and the dumbass rogue hitting on the centuries old elf) while also clearly going for a big epic feel that just fell flat. Basically, it was trying to be goofy one minute and serious next and failed at both. The sequel, made with much less budget and almost no public fanfare, wasn't amazing but it was hands down better than the first. The characters were more believable as real people in a fantasy setting and not imaginary avatars of a bunch of caffeinated teenagers, to begin with; the latter can be plenty of fun for those teenagers but a typical movie audience is going to think it's just dumb and that's exactly what happened. The plot was kept focused enough to remain coherent and uncluttered while still feeling epic, specifically stop the return of an ascendant demigod-ish dragon (or dracolich, it's been a while since I've seen it). They kept most of the focus on the party who were introduced without over the top fanfare and most of the twists were the types of things a DM throws at their players in a more or less serious campaign. If they'd made that movie first, just with better production value, it would have been a lot more successful than the original was.
I really hope that the new one learns from the mistakes of the first and specifically avoids any overt goofy references to players acting like idiots because that is absolutely not what anybody but the players of joke characters wants to see in a big budget movie and that's a very small niche compared to the vast potential audience. Or if they do include anything like that they should have it be something like an idiot minion of the main villain using a fireball wand in an enclosed space and blasting themselves and their allies, then it gets lampshaded by a main character commenting on how amazingly stupid it was.
If you want a comedy D&D movie full of tabletop culture in jokes and such, look up "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising." The first "The Gamers" film was extremely low budget and only something like forty minutes long (I think it can be found on YouTube) about a group of college kids playing a game in their dorm. It goes back and forth between the players and the same actors portraying their characters within the game, with all the cliches including a character dying then being immediately replaced by another one that looks just like him (same actor) and jokes based on the players forgetting that he's a different class now. The sequel is actually a full length film and while still done by the same indie studio on a limited budget, did have the endorsement of WotC and explicitly stated that they were playing D&D (even with the DM loaning new player their 3.5 PHB to read). I seem to recall that the actress playing the one pasty nerd's hot chick wild magic sorceress character was some writer or director or something at WotC, but a cursory web search isn't bringing anything up so that might not be true, but there is a recurring joke with the character being acted by Gary in a dress because he forgets he's playing a woman then the female actress suddenly replaces him when someone reminds him. It's a D&D movie made by D&D players for D&D players and it checks all the boxes one would expect, including arguments about rules lawyering, metagaming, absurdly improbable results from skill checks ("Please know that the horny bard does not speak for us"), consistent roleplaying ("I'm not evil! I'm chaotic neutral!" "You are evil and a whore!"), and a cameo by Nodwick as the PC's hired henchman who they left abandoned and forgotten in a dungeon after their previous characters' TPK (which is literally the first scene, so no major spoilers there).
I feel somewhat alone in thinking we need more generic fantasy movies. We get so many generic action movies and generic sci-fi movies, but very few people actually do sword and sorcery, and when they do, nobody actually tries to make it good because they've already written it off because for some reason Hollywood doesn't take fantasy seriously as a genre.
It's because the genre was overdone in the 80s. There was a brief surge in popularity for fantasy films after Lord of the Rings, but I think that The Hobbit wound up killing it off again.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
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I remember the DnD Movie that was pretty bad, and just found out there was a sequel "The Wraith of the Dragon God" that had next to no money put into it. Anyway I'm out of the loop a little bit and with the popularity of the games resurgence I was wondering if there has been any more talk of another DnD movie?
Slated for release in 2021
https://www.google.com/amp/s/comicbook.com/gaming/amp/2019/03/12/dungeons-and-dragons-movie-update/
I hope so. It really deserves a solid movie. I saw this foreign auto commercial a while back and got excited thinking it was a movie trailer lol.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrp2nmfzxio
If they do, it should focus on a specific event rather than the D&D title. It annoys me that Amazon is milking the Tolkien genre when they have The Wheel of Time already. At least if it was a DnD setting it would be less saturated.
I think the problem with DnD is that there's too much content to keep continuity, it's designed to be an open template for everything, so they could very well just make an original story.
Ultimately, I'd prefer some Brandon Sanderson adaptations before DnD though, IDK how good the content for DnD is, but Sanderson is golden.
IMDB says that the release date for that film has been pushed back to 2022. And the page was last updated July of 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2906216/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a36892274/dungeons-and-dragons-movie-details-plot-cast-spoilers-trailer-release-date/
This was from July of this year. Sounds official, but the movie won't be out until 2023.
D&D is a ruleset, and a setting perhaps. It makes no sense to make a "D&D Movie" - It makes sense to make a movie to tell a story however.
Altrazin Aghanes - Wizard/Fighter
Varpulis Windhowl - Fighter
Skolson Demjon - Cleric/Fighter
I am encouraged by the cast that this will be a well produced product, but it depends on the script how "DnD" it is vs just a generic fantasy movie. Personally I hope there are no dragons but they fight a Beholder which to me is the definitive unique DnD monster.
I also hope at some point a party member dies, and in the next scene the same actor returns playing a new character.
It makes sense, and dollars and cents, if you own a brand and you want to use that brand to rake in revenue by any means necessary. Box office could boost book sales, in the world of brand owning and dollars and cents being the sense, it's called synnergy.
The movie is called Dungeons and Dragons ... so if the word gets out there's no dragon .... But yes, a Beholder would be cooler than yet another CGI dragon. Maybe it turns out a Beholder is controlling or otherwise employing the dragon, that'd be cool.
I don't think they could do this with a movie, but if they went a TV series route, and did sorta the American Horror Story ensemble thing, you could do that, and even a TPK gimmick once and a while ... actually this sounds like a good "two part" series for AHS. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if AHS did tackle TTRPG as a theme at some point.
As long as it's a bit better than this effort to cash in (not an official D&D film but we all know the title would have been different if D&D wasn't a think in 1984):
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'd love to see D&D as an anthology series... maybe the gimmick could be that the stories are all adapted from the writers'/directors' personal play sessions. It's not uncommon for people to adapt stories from games they've played into other mediums. For example, the Vin Diesel film "The Last Witch Hunter" is inspired by a character he plays in D&D.
That said... yeah, I don't know if D&D as a generic title really works for a standalone film. It's certainly a franchise with a rich history of storytelling, but part of its appeal is that the stories are so diverse. Even two groups playing through the same Adventure Book will have entirely different stories at the end.
I suppose the smart thing might be to adapt one of the books or something, but at that point it works better to have the word "Dungeons and Dragons" be like... the franchise name while the individual movies are denoted by their subtitle.
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AHS Season 11 "Meta." Clear performance difference between PCs and NPCs. NPCs actually pop up sometimes within same episodes in different roles. PCs do die off and first half ends in a TPK, with party reconstituted in second half in new roles, so each main actor plays two PCs and an actual player. There's gotta be some sorta menace to the actual players though ... plus AHS legal probably has to do some sort of buffer against litigation from the publishers or creators of the DIE comic series since from what I've seen of it it's the best rendering of TTRPG players and player characters probably since She Kills Monsters, especially if the series wraps up with a philosophical conversation with an otherwise uncaring d20.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Calling the movie "Dungeons And Dragons" gives it brand recognition.
On the other hand, it might also cause people to associate it with the first D&D movie, so double-edged sword.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
This. DND isn’t a single setting…. Make a Workd of Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms movie, or a unique sword and sorcery setting.
….but a DND movie is, well…. Stupid.
This is why it's not stupid.
"You want to check out that Dungeons and Dragons movie?" "Yeah, sure, I never played, but curious what they made of the movie."
"You want to check out this Greyhawk movie?" "What? I heard there isn't even a pigeon in it, let alone a grey hawk."
"You want to check this Forgotten Realms movie?" "...."
Dungeons and Dragons means something, it has cultural cachet beyond the player base. Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, I'm pretty sure there are D&D players who think they know quite a bit about the game that haven't heard of the former and may not even realized the published adventures for the most part are set in the latter.
No one's going to make any association between this Dungeon and Dragons and Jeremy Irons walks onto the set of Dungeons and Dragons years ago to any more of a degree than folks wanting to see the new Dune are going to associate it with
David LynchAlan Smithee's work.Honestly I think the D&D fanbase ought to look at what love Bay's Transformers (hi Hasbro!) paid or served that toy's fans if you want to see how much attention the movie is really giving those who "really know" the brand. It took the Transformers fandom some time to really except Bay's movies as the standard bearer, quite a few still don't. Yet those movies do phenomenally well compared to other efforts to get big robots the spotlight on the big screens.
Or heck look at what Disney did with either Marvel (oversimplification of dense lore) or Star Wars (there were how many decades of lore attached to ... nah, we'll get around to calling them Legends maybe and maybe port them back in on the flip side, but we're going back to the movies as if none of that were there.
Movie won't change anyone's game. Might make a few more people curious about it.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
And it'll be recognizeable, I'm sure. There's all sorts of ways to play the game and it's all D&D, but I expect the movie to be heroic (heroes against their will, maybe, but no anti-heroes) fantasy, with a group of 4-5 heroes (with an identifiable warrior, thief, mage and healer), set in a faux-medieval western setting and, while human-centric, featuring elves and dwarves. That may seem like pretty generic fantasy flick fare, but it's really not. For moviegoers who know D&D, it'll look and feel like a standard D&D's campaign setup.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
That's because prior to Bumblebee (which wasn't really a Michael Bay movie as he wasn't the director), the Transformers films weren't aimed at fans of the franchise. They were aimed at general audiences.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I hope at some point in the movie there is a “debate” about how a spell works :).
Or a character hunts round a room and finds no loot even though the audience can see it.
Or a moment where the wizard casts fireball in a very small space.
Or a character suddenly reveals they know information they where not in the room to find out and is accused of Meta
I feel somewhat alone in thinking we need more generic fantasy movies. We get so many generic action movies and generic sci-fi movies, but very few people actually do sword and sorcery, and when they do, nobody actually tries to make it good because they've already written it off because for some reason Hollywood doesn't take fantasy seriously as a genre.
D&D is a ruleset and not a setting, but there are plenty of official settings with more than enough established lore that an officially branded movie could be set in. Of course if they set a film in the Forgotten Realms and didn't focus on or at least include a cameo by a certain drow there would be massive fanboy rage, but even writing a script along the framework of one of the numerous published campaign modules (or a new plot with similar structure) fleshed out with some decently written and acted characters could be a quality flick.
The biggest problem I see with the original and much derided D&D movie was not that they set it in a world that was made up specifically for the movie (at least I'm not aware of any pre-existing content there) but that they tried to cram in a bunch of cliched in jokes that at best got some light chuckles and generally confused or just sailed past non-players (like the dwarf loudly interjecting about hairy women and the dumbass rogue hitting on the centuries old elf) while also clearly going for a big epic feel that just fell flat. Basically, it was trying to be goofy one minute and serious next and failed at both. The sequel, made with much less budget and almost no public fanfare, wasn't amazing but it was hands down better than the first. The characters were more believable as real people in a fantasy setting and not imaginary avatars of a bunch of caffeinated teenagers, to begin with; the latter can be plenty of fun for those teenagers but a typical movie audience is going to think it's just dumb and that's exactly what happened. The plot was kept focused enough to remain coherent and uncluttered while still feeling epic, specifically stop the return of an ascendant demigod-ish dragon (or dracolich, it's been a while since I've seen it). They kept most of the focus on the party who were introduced without over the top fanfare and most of the twists were the types of things a DM throws at their players in a more or less serious campaign. If they'd made that movie first, just with better production value, it would have been a lot more successful than the original was.
I really hope that the new one learns from the mistakes of the first and specifically avoids any overt goofy references to players acting like idiots because that is absolutely not what anybody but the players of joke characters wants to see in a big budget movie and that's a very small niche compared to the vast potential audience. Or if they do include anything like that they should have it be something like an idiot minion of the main villain using a fireball wand in an enclosed space and blasting themselves and their allies, then it gets lampshaded by a main character commenting on how amazingly stupid it was.
If you want a comedy D&D movie full of tabletop culture in jokes and such, look up "The Gamers: Dorkness Rising." The first "The Gamers" film was extremely low budget and only something like forty minutes long (I think it can be found on YouTube) about a group of college kids playing a game in their dorm. It goes back and forth between the players and the same actors portraying their characters within the game, with all the cliches including a character dying then being immediately replaced by another one that looks just like him (same actor) and jokes based on the players forgetting that he's a different class now. The sequel is actually a full length film and while still done by the same indie studio on a limited budget, did have the endorsement of WotC and explicitly stated that they were playing D&D (even with the DM loaning new player their 3.5 PHB to read). I seem to recall that the actress playing the one pasty nerd's hot chick wild magic sorceress character was some writer or director or something at WotC, but a cursory web search isn't bringing anything up so that might not be true, but there is a recurring joke with the character being acted by Gary in a dress because he forgets he's playing a woman then the female actress suddenly replaces him when someone reminds him. It's a D&D movie made by D&D players for D&D players and it checks all the boxes one would expect, including arguments about rules lawyering, metagaming, absurdly improbable results from skill checks ("Please know that the horny bard does not speak for us"), consistent roleplaying ("I'm not evil! I'm chaotic neutral!" "You are evil and a whore!"), and a cameo by Nodwick as the PC's hired henchman who they left abandoned and forgotten in a dungeon after their previous characters' TPK (which is literally the first scene, so no major spoilers there).
It's because the genre was overdone in the 80s. There was a brief surge in popularity for fantasy films after Lord of the Rings, but I think that The Hobbit wound up killing it off again.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.