tl;dr – I’ve become a horse-race style observer of the D&D movie because I see the numbers as a proxy for acceptance of a hobby that remains just on the edge of pop culture.
It is inarguable that the D&D movie didn’t turn a profit at the box office. It was pulled from theaters after earning ~208 million dollars. Production costs were reported to be ~$150 million, some of that budget was higher due to filming during the early stages of the pandemic and across four nations (Iceland, Ireland, England and the U.S.A). Those costs were supposedly split evenly between Paramount and Hasbro, but Hasbro only held distribution rites in the U.K. and Canada due to their ownership of eOne at the time.
Paramount reported in Q1 that they spent at most $62 million on advertising the movie (that number is bundled with another film). Hasbro never revealed their ad spend, but did take a $25 million impairment due to the film not hitting theater expectations.
It is a highly rated film. And some would consider those box office numbers a failure or a flop. I have spent way too much time in certain corners of the internet arguing how it wasn’t flop or failure.
But my evidence isn’t raw dollar numbers. So why do I argue?
Part of it is because I’m a marketer that loves D&D. One piece of guidance I use is the massive increase in search around the movie.
Search results don’t directly connect to purchasing. They are merely an indicator. But that indicator is strong, very strong. No other event in modern D&D has the spike creation that Honor Among Thieves did.
Also, a ton of people are still watching D&D: Honor Among Thieves. It’s been available in the United States via Paramount+ for more than three months. From its release week on streaming it has been a top ten movie every week.
Just prior to the current weekend it finally released in the U.K. and Ireland. It is number one on Paramount+ in both markets. When it was released in Canada on Netflix, it was number two for most of the first week. It releases on Amazon Prime globally on August 25.
It ranks when bigger box offices successes don’t.
Some streaming isn’t captured. For example, I just watched it on Alaska Airlines. It was the third listed movie in the New Movies section, again ahead of much more popular films.
Video on Demand numbers are even stronger.
For 35 days it was number one or two on iTunes. In the 110 days it has been available there are only seven days it is not in the top 10.
On Google Play it had a 44 day run at #1. Once on general release it has never dropped below 7th.
On Amazon it wasn’t quite as popular, but the D&D movie was still strong.
On less popular services it still did well, on Rakuten it just leapt to number one last week, for example.
How does a movie that fell a bit, but not a lot, short of financial success metrics (pre-March 2020 people would use a doubling of production+marketing, now the 1.5 is more common) do this well in the modern environment?
How did D&D: The Brand (not the game) have a 74% increase in revenue when the movie was a failure? Probably because of licensed goods. There are a lot of them. I bought the Healing Potion mints for example.
Why do I argue with people about this?
Again, I’m a marketer.
But I’m also a nerd who had his D&D books knocked out of his hands walking the halls of high school. I had a parent think that the game was the path to Satan. The moral outrage and general jocks v. nerds aspect of my relationship to the game came up a lot when I was interviewed for “Hero’s Feast: Finding Community through Dungeons and Dragons.”
I’m lucky enough to see, and help, my other main hobby grow in popularity. Soccer in America is mainstream. It’s popular enough in the Seattle area that a hobby website can go independent and fully employ at least one person.
And yes, there are similar successes in D&D. Critical Role is the largest of those. They aren’t alone. These are still often niche cases, and not an indicator of mainstream acceptance, as much as there can be a mainstream in a world where every hobby and interest has its own channel.
Honor Among Thieves was an opening for something like the mainstreaming of comics. It may not have gotten there. It might have. There’s still a D&D TV show in the works, as part Hasbro Entertainment and in cooperation with Paramount.
Paramount and Hasbro also keep expanding where D&D: Honor Among Thieves is available. That’s uncommon with niche properties. The Peripheral was just cancelled. Willow was cancelled. It’s easy to cancel shows and movies that aren’t massively popular.
Streaming continues to sort itself out. Paramount was late to the game. They are moving ahead of older streaming platforms because of their original movies and their deep catalog of TV.
And I guess that means D&D: Honor Among Thieves judgement as a financial success is a lot more like a campaign than a one-shot. There was no overnight hit, just a consistent leveling up and growth over the past six months as the fans of the game keep watching, keep showing others the movie and keep powering the growth of D&D to heights that us 1980s basement dwellers thought was just a dream.
