Shortly after the critical success and box office miss of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Paramount ordered a sequel script. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein wrote it. Paramount, pre-Skydance acquisition, rejected it.
That movie project is not dead, according to Daley-Goldstein who wrote, directed and produced Honor Among Thieves. Hasbro and their core producers are welcoming the duo to shop the script.
Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein say rights holder Hasbro remains determined to find a new studio home for “Dungeons & Dragons 2.”
…
“Yeah, absolutely,” Goldstein told DeAngelo when asked whether anyone was still trying to make the economics work. “I think Hasbro is a big believer in it, and if they can figure out a studio partner to make it work, they’ll want to proceed. As are our producers.”
Now, there are a lot of reasons why Hasbro would be interested in the movie being made.
- They’d share the cost, though both Paramount and Hasbro took impingements.
- No other project generated more interest in D&D.
- Stranger Things is no longer a cultural phenomena. The expansion series are not generating the interest the original five season series did.
- The Forgotten Realms project run by Shawn Levy and written by Drew Crello after Rawson Marshall Thuber’s original writing is dead.
- The D&D Documentary run by Joe Manganiello and Kyle Newman is probably dead as it missed the 50th year anniversary it was announced for, by a lot, while remaining in pre-production.
- Craig Mazin’s BG3 sequel on HBO won’t start in earnest until after he’s done with Last of Us.
- John August’s Strahd-Ravenloft origin story for Netflix is announced, but barely started.
It’s going to be a while before D&D for TV or movies are back, and from the above you may notice that lots of projects don’t make it from publicly acknowledged to publicly available — the only one not on the list in the post-covid environment is a single episode of Secret Level.
- Additionally Hasbro-Wizards of the Coast had some involvement in Onward!, Stranger Things and are adjacent to sometime competitor/sometime cohort Critical Roles’ two animated series, kinda.
Fantasy TV and movies are in a bit of a downturn lately. The Game of Thrones follow-ups aren’t as popular as that powerhouse. Cancellations despite strong critical reception are common. Cancellations of shows that were putting up numbers are common. Willow gone. Shadow & Bone gone. Six of Crows, announced and never made. Wheel of Time gone, but coming back animated. Rings of Power’s slow release schedule probably meant you forgot about it.
When Paramount rejected the D&D:2 script they were scaling way back in order to get bought, eventually by Skydance. They are pulling out of that slow two years.
Maybe the new Skydance-Paramount merger could mean they get back involved. David Ellison has a history of working with Hasbro, with Paramount before he owned them, and it is the press tour for his movie with Daley-Goldstein where the news of D&D:2 remaining in market became public.
There’s additional pressure on Paramount and probably Warner Bros to get movies into the pipeline — their merger includes promises of 30+ movies total from the two legacy studios. To avoid lengthy legal battles one or both may start announcing a slate of projects soon, especially ones that are made in the U.S.
Hasbro will want a film because they want to maintain interest in D&D the Brand — placements in big box stores, theaters, the top of Amazon — that can’t happen from core D&D. Plus, they never really released a book to go along with Honor Among Thieves, instead they merely credited Daley with co-writing one chapter in one book.
The new “franchise” format should support co-releases much better. The seasons system could capture a Season of Thieves easily.
Brandon Sanderson’s TV project, and the massive RPGs going along with it, are building up.
Maybe competition, the legal issues around the merger of mergers, and the knowledge that Honor Among Thieves held streaming legs for two full years is going to push D&D:2 from written to pre-production.
