Warner Bros Taking D&D Back To The Silver Screen?
May 9, 2013 by brennon
It came to my attention yesterday that Warner Bros have acquired the rights to produce another Dungeons & Dragons film. Yes, they are trying to revive this wounded beast...
The first film was released in 2000 and was a total flop. Despite being taken to the cinema rather than going straight-to-DVD it was overacted, badly written and not at all what people were expecting.
Wrath of the Dragon God and The Book of Vile Darkness tried to remedy the painful first film but while they drew on the source material with more care and attention they were still lacking. They just didn't feel like Dungeons & Dragons.
The problem here as I see it is that it's nigh on impossible to do a film on Dungeons & Dragons without someone getting upset about it. While D&D has it's official stories and legends of its own like Forgotten Realms it's always been about individual narrative.
The other route to take is that of The Gamers where you tell the whole tabletop story from the dice rolling to the 'in-game action'. Whether this would ever be considered for a major film release though is something else entirely.
Somewhat tainting the news further is that the script is being written by someone who wrote Clash of the Titans and Red Riding Hood, not exactly two of the most engaging stories out there. It's made even worse by the original producer of Dungeons & Dragons from the year 2000 being involved!
I guess we have to wait and see with this one.
What do you think of Dungeons & Dragons as a film?
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They should forget about trying to make it ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and just make a damn well put together fantasy flick and tag the D&D moniker on to it.
Some of the D&D novels would make good films, but that’s not because they are D&D but because they are good stories.
I can’t see this ending well as it stands, but I’m always willing to be shown the error of my ways.
Instead of trying to compete with fantasy blockbusters of the LotR or Harry Potter kind, D&D should carve a niche of its own; imagine a film that follows a band of characters through a dungeon. If the characters would be well fleshed out the story would practically unwind by itself; you have the claustrophobic confines of the underground, some of the band are in it for the riches, some may have been forced into it, there might be one with a hidden agenda … throw in a dragon and they better learn to cooperate before they hit that main hall.… Read more »
So what I’m saying is they shouldn’t be telling people “look, here’s some CGI, now you should be impressed” but instead concentrate on writing a good story. I don’t watch Game of Thrones for the dragons. I watch it because I want to know what happens next to the characters. The beautiful locales, exotic peoples and magic are just there to say “welcome to this fantastic realm, step in!”. I think the series’ success owes it to exactly the same thing as good historic dramas; the plot and characters are interesting. Costumes and horse-riding are just a cherry on the… Read more »
Oh please let Jeremy Irons return, the man was hilarious.
I’ll second the call for turning the old D&D novels in to movies, with one little thing that would worry me would be that they might run out the old story of young protagonist gets dragged in to fantasy world, protagonist becomes the hero, protagonist learns life lesson and now feel better in real life 🙂 I can count off a couple that have done that in the past (Forbidden Kingdom & Warriors of Virtue) while good movies i really don’t think it would work with D&D.
BoW Justin
If they add in the “liar revealed” plot type a lot of those average guy learns life lesson stories use I may have to kill something.
Yup, running with existing stories is probably the way to go. Or, just setting it in the Forgotten Realms and drawing on the wealth of background there to make an original tale. It would be fairly epic to see a proper Dragon Lance film though.
…the animation was severely disappointing. 🙁
Ben
Agreed. So far they have used very bad original stories set on world of they own and failed. What they need is to adapt existing story or just use existing world.
They should drop this idea coz its been proven it makes for god awful fantasy twoddle. They should drop it in favour of my idea of making W40K The Horus Heresy trilogy of movies using WWE wrestlers and method Actors! Jim Caviezel as The Emperor! Kane as Horus! Brock Lesnar as Leman Russ! Tom Hiddleston as Fulgrim!
This ties into the internet theory that every film is made better by adding Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to it… 😉
unfortunately any 40k film would be twoddle as GW wouldn’t release creative control of it enough to let anything other than their own messed up sense of whats dramatic appear on the screen.
It’s time for Animaniacs!!
or they could just leave it for the guys like The Gamers
Low budget, high fun.
I will only be happy if vin diesel is in it
WotC pretty much killed D&D, to make a good movie I think they would have to go Old School & breakout with some of the classic stories with good plots. It would be cool to see on the big screen if they could actually make a good movie
The problem with a D&D movie is it will always be held up against the LoTR trilogy and it will fail. Forgotten Realms is essentially Middle Earth with a couple of extra bits thrown in, the same goes for Dragon Lance, no matter how far they try and distance themselves the comparison will always be drawn because Tolkien’s books were such a massive influence on the original source material.
I’d love to see a good film come out of this, I really would, I just don’t expect it to happen