Okay, I have read through the thread once and here are some initial thoughts--
First off, I am disappointed. I had high hopes for this. This clearly was a labor of love for JM and I felt confident that the IP was in good hands. Also, the cost of producing a CGI-heavy show, while still exorbitant, is not so great as to be impossible for a show (I remember Forgotten Realms getting optioned back when D&D 3.0 was released and flat out thinking, "never going to happen").
Secondly, I agree that neither
Shadow of the Dragon Queen nor the board game are great metrics to gauge interest in the
Dragonlance IP in general, but at the same time I don't think it is ridiculous or moronic or however people phrased it that WotC is using them in their judgement on whether to move forward with the project. When making decisions of this magnitude, you use the information you have available, imperfections and all. It's the only recent data for the existing gamer base. It would have been better if the products were good enough that their success/failure could be honestly said to be mostly about whether people were interested in what
Dragonlance itself offers (instead of the specific quality of the adventure/board game), but that's not what they ended up getting. Someone mentioned it being better than focus groups or test audiences, and I think that is accurate -- for judging how interested people already playing D&D are/could be in
Dragonlance. For that group, checking their interest in a particularly helpful way would entail releasing more trial balloon products (which again may or may not be good quality). That could easily be a case of throwing good money after bad. And they decided (I believe more based on
Honor Amongst Thieves performance and maybe some lesson from Balder's Gate 3 than those two sales metrics) that they weren't going to move forward. That, IMO, was the default position anyways -- they spent up to the point where the spending was cheap, but couldn't find anything in the tea leaves that made them want to take a big risk.
Third point, although it is important that (current) D&D-players buy into the show to generate buzz, it also has to grab a wider audience to justify the FX we expect from a show about dragons and magic users. I think people have rightly pointed out that the problematic/outdated/simply unusual elements of
Dragonlance can be fixed, removed, or de-emphasized; but those are things you already have to do just to get it to the starting line without a handicap. One still needs a hook that brings in a broader audience. Yes, 'a conspiracy of evil dragons opposed by a rag-tag group of adventurers' is not a bad hook, but swap out dragons for some lower FX budget opponents like vampires or fey and that's every Syfy or TNT original program this past decade. From what I can tell, the two things DL has going for it are:
1) People like us (those who started gaming way before the current boom, particularly those who are still invested in D&D enough to hang out and discuss the game when not actively playing it) have strong positive memories of the primary initial narrative, the characters, and much of the story world (minus whichever parts we don't like or find dated).
2) A somewhat famous guy (to those outside D&D, I think he's "that guy from
True Blood and
Magic Mike") is working on it, and clearly loves it.
Both of those are good things to have, they aren't solid bellwethers as to if something is going to be a widely successful TV show.
Now re-reading and responding to others--
Which doesn't make sense. Because if he buys it they aren't developing it.
If he licenses it, they can then develop it.
If they're developing it, they wouldn't sell it.
They might have other reasons for not wanting to sell it to him*. While they are not developing DL now, they might want to do so in the future. They already have Weis and Hickman to deal with when they touch the property (remember the kerfuffle about their latest novels right when
Shadow of the Dragon Queen was about to drop?). Also Ed Greenwood with FR and Courtney Solomon with movies. Intrinsically tying your products to some other party means more opportunity for rights battles, public feuds, or the like. It is more interesting if they also weren't interested in licensing DL to Manganiello, but we don't know if that was ever brought up (he might not have an interest in that to begin with).
*Including mere consistency--they also wouldn't sell Mystara to Bruce Heard, and they seem very unlikely to develop that themselves.
Suspect movie might play into this as well.
I think that* likely had a lot to do with them closing eOne, which likely was the larger of the reasons for discontinuing this project.
*and BG3 being a huge successful D&D-adjacent associated product they didn't need to develop themselves.
the D&D version of Lord of the Rings...
That's actually a good point for comparison. People have been mentioning that
Dragonlance is usable as a TV show concept, but would need 1) to update the race and gender distribution of the characters*, and 2) rebuild or reframe the central narrative. Well,
Lord of the Rings just put out a billion-dollar TV series that updated the race and gender distribution and made a new** central narrative, and while we don't know the actual viewership figures, the public impression is that it has bombed spectacularly. If anything, it is a strong indicator that just setting stories in a setting people already love isn't a guarantee for something to be a success.
*that get to do interesting things in-focus, in the case of gender
**in this case because the IP purchased didn't include one
It's hardly surprising, I imagine they sat down and worked out how much it would cost. The thing with D&D is it's not GoT or WoT or RoP, it's much more high fantasy than any of those. And high fantasy has far more expensive FX shots, as well as more opportunities to look bad if they don't work (HAT had a bit of this). Consider those draconians. They are on screen a lot in Dragonlance. If they aren't going to look like rubber-suited Doctor Who rejects they either need very elaborate animatronics or be fully CGI. By with point it's probably easier just to make the whole show animated.
The only way to do a live action D&D TV show would be to work out what FX you can do with the available budget, and write the story around that.
They could do a lot with building up to the draconians (none wholly in frame and in full lighting and interacting with people until episode X, except maybe as a grouped army marching or the like). Same with dragons. However, would people want to watch that? Almost not showing the monster worked well for
Jaws, but in so many movies since then they've tried to do the same thing and it failed spectacularly.
It was a canon discussion, and I'm pretty sure there was the hint of a bristling about how the novels eclipsed the modules. (Do people want Verminaard surviving his death and calling himself VERMINAARD LIVES backwards?)
We are at hints of bristling (by a single dev who is not in charge at this point) in a discussion about the timeline, and using that to extrapolate the companies' general position. I'm not saying that this isn't a data point, but I am saying I think there are a lot of other data points unknown to us that undoubtedly have far greater influence on their thinking on the IP as a whole.
That's a bit of a chicken-egg question.
The gods departed Krynn (and took all their spellcasting clerics with them) a considerable time before the Cataclysm. It was I believe meant to be a sign of godly disapproval and a warning to Istar to change their ways, but didn't get read that way (Istar was all 'Paladine is weary, we must go EVEN HARDER to stamp out Evil to help him out' and just went on Inquisition-ing along just as they had before). The good gods of course, largely argue that Krynn abandoned them first by embracing the teachings of the Kingpriest and doing all sorts of evil in the name of the Good. And even before the Kingpriest showed up, clerics were getting very rare. The last Kingpriest, Beldinas (the guy who actually ended up getting himself Cataclysmed), was actually a monk from a remote mountain fastness chosen by wild acclamation when he proved he could actually cast cleric spells, which was a very big deal at the time.
In terms of making a show around this, I think it is telling how far we can go into the weeds and new layers still matter in how one views the gods and other actors in the scenario (both in terms of culpability and in terms of having made good decisions). If I were making a (modern, 8-12 episodes/season) show on this world, I'd either lean into 'each person discussing the situation is a biased, unreliable source' or simplify it down to 'overzealous followers of Deific Team Good turn
Inquisition-mode and break the trust between the people and the gods (for the people-that the gods are actually good; for the gods-that people worshipping them actually helps the world) and the gods leave for a time-out/reset.'
Also, if they cancelled this based on the (lack of) sales of Warriors of Krynn. Oh boy, does WotC not understand why that product didn't sell.
People have been focusing on that, but the quote was "
not moving forward due to several issues, including Hasbro's sale of the eOne studio and the poor performance of a Dragonlance D&D adventure and board game" which is a very typical 'there are many factors, here are three examples' style of writing that really doesn't tell us how many issues there actually were, nor really how influential those used in the example actually are.
