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Dungeons & Dragons Is Getting a Film Franchise 210

Posted by Soulskill from the hope-they-hit-the-saving-throw dept.
New submitter IT.luddite sends word that Hasbro and Warner Bros. have announced Dungeons & Dragons will be getting its own film franchise. They already have a script, and they'll be working with production company Sweetpea Entertainment, but they haven't picked a director, yet. They'll have at least some of the people on board who worked on the D&D movie from 2000, which was a flop. The deal between Hasbro and Warner Bros. comes after a prolonged legal battle about who owned the rights to a D&D movie. They note, "All rights for future Dungeons & Dragons productions have been unified and returned to Wizards of the Coast, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hasbro."
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Dungeons & Dragons Is Getting a Film Franchise More

Dungeons & Dragons Is Getting a Film Franchise

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  • Mazes and Monters (Score:5, Funny)

    by Stele ( 9443 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @03:34PM (#50251461) Homepage

    Still waiting for a proper sequel to Mazes and Monsters! Get to it JJ!

  • Roll Save Versus (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @03:40PM (#50251519)
    Bad ScreenWriting.

  • Now that that is solidified, it means new computer games, so DDO players can expect the servers to be forcibly closed the way Star Wars Galaxies was in preparation for The Online Republic.

    • This could potentially explain why WotC was absent at Gen Con 2015. They didn't have a booth in the exhibitor hall, and they didn't have a presence in the gaming hall. Baldman Games was left to run all of the D&D events, and they had to do it in Hall D. Paizo kicked WotC right out of the Sagamore Ballroom. It was a pretty terrible gaming experience, really, and that makes me a sad panda. It was loud and crowded. I had six games and all but one were with seven players. We were hearing from a lot of peopl

      • It's definitely sad.

        And so much of it goes back to the edition wars when 4th edition provoked a schism, leading to the creation of Pathfinder as an entirely separate and incompatible branch of the mainstream fantasy gaming hobby. In some ways it's come full circle now with Paizo (Pathfinder) taking WotC's place at Gencon, because for a large number of people now, Pathfinder IS the true successor to D&D in everything but the name and IP.
        • They are not incompatible, they are both d20 systems. It's like if you learned to drive auto and switched to standard.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Grog6 ( 85859 )

          We still play 1st ed rules; we've been playing since the box sets, and see no reason to change. And Gamma world, for the Tech stuff. (White Plume Mountain was first, iirc)

          We have modified some things over the years as too powerful. :)

          Our last gig had our Gang on my world's version of a space shuttle, when Vecna found them.

          Someone made an incredible roll; and they instead of being; oh whatever Vecna would do to you for totally killing all his enemies, and destroying his skull citadel, with said peeps inside

  • A Flop? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @03:45PM (#50251555)

    A flop is simply a movie that fails to attract an audience because it isn't good, Jupiter Ascending is a flop. The 2000 D&D movie was so god awful that it alone stands out in my mind as easily as something so bad I'd rather be in a meeting than attend. My girlfriend and I laughed so hard at the unintentionally funny parts of the movie that our judgement was so impaired, we got married. The damage was so severe, we have never recovered from this bad judgement and remain married.

    The movie was an unmitigated disaster, and honestly if this were my property I'd never again let someone try to make a movie based on it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenx ( 2211586 )
      A couple bad older films does not instantly mean a new film would be bad. It's not like they're going to just have the same people put out yet another film.

    • You'd rather be in a meeting than attend a movie that causes you to laugh hard?

    • It sounds like you had a great time... yet it also seems as though you hate your wife... I can see how you have conflicted feelings over this movie...

    • our judgement was so impaired, we got married. The damage was so severe, we have never recovered from this bad judgement and remain married.

      An initial failed Wisdom check, and permanent loss of 2 Wisdom points.

    • Some people could do it well (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Etherwalk ( 681268 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @05:51PM (#50252529)

      The movie was an unmitigated disaster, and honestly if this were my property I'd never again let someone try to make a movie based on it.

      It was, but the solution isn't shoving it in a drawer, it's turning it over to a better team. The TNG movies were not particularly good (the last one was ridiculous), but the new Trek movies are good. (They have the problem of running too far away from the science and thought-problems, but they are fun to watch). The rotoscoped LOTR was generally hated by all, but the Peter Jackson (although having lots of problems) was a great production to have made.

      Joss Whedon could do a fun D&D movie, for example. Thinking about who else might, I am really curious as to what Aaron Sorkin would do with it... "The Tea Party Ogre..."

  • Games and Movies feeding one another (Score:4, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @03:46PM (#50251565) Homepage Journal

    Even though the new Star Trek movies depart from the original canon, they still feed the last official bastion thereof, the MMO. And the same developer does the D&D MMO (Neverwinter), in the same engine in fact. One drives demand for the other, and the same group with disposable income is the primary target for both. Expect some pretty horrible movies aimed at the lowest common denominator amongst the 14-35 set.

    • Some things are made for blockbuster movies, and some things are just better as low budget tv and web comics. I think D&D fits better as a tv series. You need to do a few seasons of star trek tos before you can have star trek: the motion picture.

  • Should be... again. (Score:5, Informative)

    by vux984 ( 928602 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @03:46PM (#50251573)

    As in " Hasbro and Warner Bros. have announced Dungeons & Dragons will be getting its own film franchise." ... again.

    Or are we pretending now that they they didn't already drop a bunch of D&D turds?

    In 2000 (saw it, amusing for what it was, but it was awful)
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt01... [imdb.com]

    IMDB lso lists this, which I haven't seen
    2005 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt04... [imdb.com] ("straight to video")
    2012 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt17... [imdb.com] ("TV movie")

    And which seem to have "2" and "3" in the subtitles... suggesting they were sequels? I haven't seen them, and based on the 1st one... I'm not sure if anyone should.

    • I think someone told me that one of those sequels is actually worth watching because it is better than the first one. I refuse to believe that, though. Still haven't watched them.

      • Re:Should be... again. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by suutar ( 1860506 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @04:15PM (#50251817)

        "better than the first one" is an almost perfect example of "damning with faint praise" :)

      • That's a fair summary. The first one was painfully awful. The second two were ok. Not great, but ok. Perfectly acceptable light entertainment.

        The third one has that situation beloved of many D&D players: The mixed-alignment party.

        • That's a fair summary. The first one was painfully awful. The second two were ok.

          The first one had a truly brilliant Jeremy Irons chewing up the scenery and overacting almost enough to make up for the lack of acting from the rest of the cast. Plus it came with a free episode of the Crystal Maze randomly pasted into the middle.

      • ... that they never made any sequels to the Matrix.

        Now that would have been weird.

    • The second one was not terrible, as direct-to-video movies go. Though it would have been better if they had dropped any references to the first movie.

      It was not good enough for me to have bothered seeing the 3rd, though.

      • I agree, the first was absolutely awful, and the second was quite decently watchable. I've seen the third too, and I suggest you give it a try - it's at least as good as the second, and I think perhaps a bit better. It's still not a great work of cinema, but it's ok.

    • Sweetpea Entertainment was responsible for those steaming piles. Now if they can keep those creeps out of this one, it has a chance at being good.
  • Only Uwe Boll can make the 2000 D&D movie look good in relationship to a new D&D movie. Of course if they follow the 4E style, it will be a boring miniature movie.

  • Maybe have him play a wizard!

  • Hey, I wonder if they will go way back and mine the old animated TV show. Now THAT was some gritty fantasy! ;-)

    • There was apparently the un-aired series finale that reportedly in the scrip included the fact that Venger was Dungeon Master's son and the children were there to help redeem him. Once this was complete, they had the option to go home; however, stayed for some other reason (I don't recall).

      You could build an entire franchise off of this premise and probably make a lot of 40' something's very happy. Just imagine if the Transformers franchise built off the existing cartoon mythology rather than giving us ra

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

        that is precisely how it plays out. It's on the BCI DVD edition as an easter egg audio play.

        (source: I've got the BCI R1 DVD set).

  • They'll do it wrong. Let's buy the rights. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @04:16PM (#50251823)

    I propose a Kickstarter to buy the movie and tv rights to D&D to prevent Hollywood from making any further craptacular "D&D" movies.
    Note to the movie industry: Dungeons and Dragons is a rules framework upon which stories are built, not a story itself. Making a "D&D" movie is like basing a film off "Hoyle's Book of Games."

    Suggestion: find a story that has relatable characters doing interesting things in circumstances that make us care about the outcome. Or better, WRITE a story that has relatable characters doing interesting things in circumstances that make us care about the outcome. If you do either of these things you will likely have a popular, profitable film. If you take a collection of one dimensional cardboard cutouts and have them progress through a series of tropes in a totally predicable and intellectually insulting manner and expect it to be successful because of the D&D branding, you will have a commercial flop and be ripped by gamers for soiling The Hobby.

    We're gamers. Telling stories is what we DO. D&D is how we do it. Want a good D&D movie? Go to GenCon and ask people their gaming stories. Or better yet, buy the books, roll some dice, and live some of your own. Your script is waiting for you. Go play it.

    • Dungeons and Dragons is a rules framework upon which stories are built, not a story itself. Making a "D&D" movie is like basing a film off "Hoyle's Book of Games."

      You mean like a movie based on "Clue". Or "Battleship". Or "Candyland"?

    • Note to the movie industry: Dungeons and Dragons is a rules framework upon which stories are built, not a story itself. Making a "D&D" movie is like basing a film off "Hoyle's Book of Games."

      That's exaggerating. D&D provides a fully worked-out setting that would work equally well for a movie, and even provides pre-made adventures to play. Granted, there are people who don't use the setting, and they're not likely to make a module into movie--though they may well use some the characters there. But

  • Record of Lodoss War (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Thinking about a film franchise of D&D somehow always reminds me of the anime "Record of Lodoss War." That was well done and had obvious D&D mechanics (including "called shot on the dragon's eye"), well thought out characters, and an interesting plot which could have been taken out of a D&D campaign. In fact I vaguely recall that it was actually a narrative account of a real D&D (or similar RPG) campaign...

    I'm sure it's more hard than this, but why not just get a good D&D group to play t

    • RoLW also started out as a game. Remarkable what a script can do. (No, I would not call the D&D film adaptations as "scripted.")

  • DND is active entertainment; movies are passive entertainment.

    This new venture will end the same as the last one did: Disaster.

  • The Dungeons & Dragons movies were cringe worthy, but they are absolute masterpieces when compared to Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

    Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight was a direct to video with combined 3D and 2D animation. It has a rating of 1/10 on IMDB. No Rotten Tomatoes score, but they list 20% of people liking it and a 2.6/5

    From Wikipedia
    Reaction to the film was predominantly negative. Dan Heaton describes it as a "disaster" and "tiresome." David Cornelius says it is "genre che

    • MST3K made Manos, Hands of Fate not only watchable, but entertaining enough to show my wife.

      I don't believe there is anything beyond the MST3K treatment.

  • As long as they remember to put in a cute redhead girl with an invisibility cape, we're good. Oh, and Danny DeVito as a hard-drinking Dungeon Master. Maybe cut the kid with the unicorn.

  • ... but rather on a novel or something based on the game.

    I don't trust hollywood to write something about a game or fandom with any competence unless they do it for years... fucking up repeatedly along the way and only after going through that do they finally figure out the rules.

    Comic book movies are starting to get decent... how many years of comic book movies did we have to go through before we got the Chis Nolan batman movies etc?

    I just don't trust most producers/directors to do it correctly.

  • How to do it right. (Score:3)

    by tekrat ( 242117 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @04:43PM (#50252085) Homepage Journal

    The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon from the 1980's was actually pretty damn good considering how bad everything else at the time was.

    There's an episode I can't quite recall, except to say that they go up against a bad guy that Venger called "Master", and this thing was essentially a walking, talking nuclear explosion -- even Dungeon Master couldn't handle this thing.

    That's how you have to do it; make it epic, break the rules and be imaginative. Unfortunately, even the most neophyte DM probably has more imagination than all of Hollywood combined.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tekrat ( 242117 )

      And that said, the best idea would be to do it like they did "The Lego Movie", where you bash all the realms together, and then find out late into the film that it's really just a bunch of kids sitting around a table rolling dice...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

        hm... sounds like every other movie that turns out to be a game that'll never get launched ever, like Zathura and Jumanji...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tyketto ( 97265 )
      Someone please correct me if I'm wrong... But wasn't the D&D toon from the 1980s the only time that the roles of Peter Cullen and Frank Welker were reversed? Most of the time when they were together, Cullen was the good guy (Optimus Prime, commander of the Voltron Force) and Welker was the bad guy (Megatron)... In D&D, Cullen was the bad guy (Venger), and Welker was the good 'guy' (he played Uni). Any other time where that happened with them, or that Cullen was the bad guy?
    • You're right. The cartoon is kind of cheesy but it works (I just watched a bit on youtube, and it's still stands up as pretty well for what it was.) That movie was just plain awful in every conceivable way. The fact that they're getting some of the same people involved is a mistake.

  • In theory...

    I mean, so many worlds to choose from. Way more than Marvel and DC combined.

    Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Ravenloft....

    Each with several (in some cases dozens) of big recognizable series...

    Man, I would love to see Soth, knight of the black rose (with an Opeth sound track) or the dark elf saga or the legend of huma... the list goes on!

    If they could be done well, this could generate tons of interest in my age bracket (2nd edition!)

  • The reason they're doing this is pretty clear - for the first time, there's another tabletop RPG competing with D&D for the title of dominant brand in the fantasy tabletop RPG field, that being Pathfinder. I don't think the exact numbers have been released, but at Gencon this year it looked like Pathfinder was on pretty much equal footing with D&D in terms of people playing it (not to mention that Pathfinder got the entire Sagamore Ballroom this year when I've heard in previous years they only got h

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

      anyone know what happened to the Heroclix system?

      My company launched Mage Knight: Rebellion (the first commercial Heroclix system game) in the UK waaay back when (2000), in fact that was the world premiere at one of Sheffield's largest Conference Centres (I booked out all four floors and filled the building beyond capacity. Apparently people were getting turned away at the door during the official launch tournament finals).

      • Heroclix definitely still exists. I saw a whole bunch of booths at Gencon selling Heroclix stuff, some of which I know sells for a metric ton of money. As for playing it, I have no idea - I didn't see it there, but it's entirely possible that it was there and I just missed it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ihtoit ( 3393327 )

          yep, it was always expensive. The following is UK RETAIL: The Mage Knight: Rebellion display case on its own was £24, the figurines themselves ran £8 for five randoms (four single-click and one double) in booster packs, or nine singles or seven singles/one double, rules and dice in the starter packs for £14, and the Atlantis War Machines expansion (the first one with the HUGE tabletop tanks with six discs) ran £30 EACH. A decent tournament army with one tank could easily set you back

          • Prices don't even surprise me anymore on any tabletop game stuff. This year was my first Gencon, and when I went to the exhibit hall I saw a bunch of stuff I had no idea even existed. Then, I walked by a booth selling stuff for a TCG called Weiss Schwarz, which has sets that are all based off various licensed animes and video games.

            Not knowing the draw of the whole thing, I blew $15 on a Kill la Kill "Trial Box", which is basically a starter deck that always contains the same cards. I didn't intend to play

  • ...how great the last [imdb.com] D&D movie was, right?

    • That wasn't the last one. It had two direct-to-video sequels. There's near-universal agreement that the sequels were both much better movies than the first one.

  • They've announced the cast! (Score:3)

    by Sir_Eptishous ( 873977 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @05:12PM (#50252287)
    Paul Giamatti: The DM
    Marc Meron: Cunnilingun, the Elven BladeSinger
    Melissa McCarthy: Dervich, the Dwarf War Priest
    Adam Sandler: Sneechy, the Human Rogue
    Forrest Whitaker: Sardonicus, Elf Wizard

  • [Cartman and friends are pretending to be Lord of the Rings characters; they walk by a group of kids playing in a yard]

    Kyle Broflovski: What are you guys doing?
    Town Kid: We're playing Harry Potter!
    Eric Cartman: Ha! Fags!

  • they fucked up WOTC, which fucked up M:TG and all the other games they had going at the time. I mean, whose fucking bright idea was it to introduce those utterly useless giant modifier cards?? Like it's not frickin' obvious you're playing one of those in a match...!

  • "12-sided dice" WTF ?!? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Morpeth ( 577066 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @05:45PM (#50252505)

    "Hollywood is again rolling its 12-sided dice and taking a chance on translating the popular “Dungeons & Dragons” role-playing game into a movie."

    I couldn't get past the first sentence. It's a 20-sided, and it's die, not dice. If you're going to talk to us nerds about gaming culture, and something as important as D&D, at least make SOME effort. Reporting these days sucks... seriously.

    • That shows me they are far more likely to throw a fumble - 1 , and make it damn impossible to throw a critical :p.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by T.E.D. ( 34228 )

      I couldn't get past the first sentence. It's a 20-sided, and it's die, not dice. If you're going to talk to us nerds...

      I'll go out on a limb here, and say that you should probably stay far away from any upcoming D&D movie. For example, I guarantee you it will feature a magic user firing off spells with abandon, with nary a nap between them.

  • Ooh (Score:2)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 )
    Hopefully it'll enjoy the same success as the 70's era cartoon of the same name. Anyone remember that thing? That memory is tucked away in the same mental filing cabinet as the Wookie Life-Day Christmas Special.
  • It is called 'Game of Thrones'

  • Remember the paperbacks? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by msobkow ( 48369 ) on Tuesday August 04, 2015 @08:52PM (#50253385) Homepage Journal

    Do you remember the paperbacks written for D&D?

    They sucked, too.

    The problem is the D&D universe is meant to be explored and played with. It places little emphasis on character development (as in personality), and even less on storylines. This has carried through to every attempt ever made to turn them into movies, whether for the big screen or for TV.

    The biggest problem they face is that there are no "standard" characters that people are waiting to see, because there are so many characters from the various game packs, not one of which had a memorable personality to make them famous. So where something like "Lord of the Rings" had memorable characters like Gandalf that people were waiting to see brought to life, D&D has no such strengths.

    I predict another 1-star flop.

    • Adapting DragonLance ?

      Emphasis on character development (as in personality) - Check
      Storyline - Check
      Characters that people are waiting to see - Check, check and check.

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