This being said, Hasbro were always going to try their hand at making a film about Dungeons & Dragons. So it’s not just that it’s hard to build a film around D&D, it’s also that the brand has become tarnished by decades of really awful tie-in media designed to cash in on a brand that is already a challenge when it comes to cinematic adaptation. This problem is only compounded by the fact that numerous attempts to produce a D&D film have all ended badly on both a creative and commercial level. To be blunt, the only really bankable IP that D&D has to offer are a load of monsters designed in the early years of the hobby and while those can definitely shift T-shirts and miniatures they’re not going to sell a film franchise. Smarm aside, this does at least approach the truth and regardless of why this situation might have arisen, the facts are that you’re not going to build a cinematic universe out of NPCs from old D&D books. The lack of recognisable NPCs simply proves that the PCs were always the stars. The charitable spin on this would be to say that this proves that the owners of D&D have been doing their job as D&D is not a product to be consumed but a product designed to spark creativity in others. Personally, the only D&D characters I can imagine wanting to watch a film about are Minsc and Boo from the 1990s Baldur’s Gate games and even then, I suspect the charm would start to wear thin after the second time Dave Bautista screams ‘Go for the eyes Boo!’ Salvatore’s Drow ranger stories from the 1990s Forgotten Realms spin-off novels and the 1980s Saturday-morning cartoon: They were fine at the time, but they were disposable fluff that has since been allowed to go stale and now nobody is going to pay to go and see their big screen adventures. The obvious choice would be Dragonlance but while those books were a huge hit at the time, they have not aged well and all past attempts to resurrect either the setting or the product line have ended in abject failure. Even those of us who have spent a long time playing D&D, reading about D&D, and reading D&D spin-off novels would struggle to name a single character, storyline, or setting that is both fondly remembered and intimately associated with the D&D brand. The problem facing the producers of any potential D&D movie is that despite decades of sustained creativity by thousands of individuals both amateur and professional, you would struggle to associate the D&D brand with any of the usual entities around which intellectual property and fandom tend to cohere. I hate the films and was never that interested in the comics but the raw material was undeniably there. I mean… when they decided to use Marvel comics as the basis for a billion-dollar movie franchise the suits were able to draw on literally hundreds of iconic characters and thousands of revered story-lines for inspiration. How do you even make a film about D&D? Despite being at the heart of a huge cultural phenomenon that has seen nearly five decades of sustained creative work, Dungeons & Dragons is not a brand with a whole lot of bankable IP. In this case, that film is Dungeons & Dragons: Honor among Thieves, a hyper-commercial, hyper-saturated Hollywood blockbuster built around corporate IP that I should (by all accounts) loathe but somehow wound up absolutely adoring.
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