I disagree.
Hasbro is a high caliber corporation so a 'meh' cheesy flim is not going to be to their liking.
Not sure if serious...
Hasbro are in a legal battle (or have won/lost a legal battle, it's unclear) with the guy who made the super-cheesy D&D movies to take the rights from him and WB and give them to Universal. So in that sense, yes, they're trying to move away from cheesiness.
On the other hand, Hasbro are trying to get movies made of Candyland, Monopoly, Ouija, Stretch Armstrong, and Clue, and already got a Battleship movie made, which, whilst clearly quite expensive, was certainly "cheesy" and got "meh" reviews. So Battleship could easily be said to be "meh" and "cheesy".
I'm also quite sure that Hasbro don't give a flying sod as to whether the movies are "cheesy" if they are successful, and help sell Hasbro products.
The idea that "high caliber corporations" don't produce/back "meh"/"cheesy" movies is a pretty funny one, though. Virtually every "meh"/"cheesy" movie has an extremely high caliber corporation behind it. A recent example is the utterly godawful Google propaganda film with Vince Vaughn (thankfully the name of which escapes me). It could not have been any more "meh" or "cheesy".
Frankly, I think you are setting the bar too high. And the fact that there is currently litigation over the D&D movie rights with movie studios waiting in the wings tends to confirm that.
I didn't know about the litigation when I made my comments. That does make things more interesting. I don't believe that WB/Solomon want anything but to hang on to the rights, though - they're not "waiting in the wings" to make some sort of high-quality D&D movie (c.f. Solomon's record on D&D movies) to further WotC's brand. They're just litigating to hold on to an IP - but that does show that they place SOME value on it, so I concede that point!
Hrm, little known property that makes a bajillion dollars doing a fantasy movie... Pirates of the Caribbean anyone?
In 2002, the year before PotC came out, would you honestly have thought a fantasy action movie starring Johnny Depp based on a Disney ride would have been a huge thing?
Not many people, that's for sure. But PotC was kind of "the perfect storm", with an ultra-accessible high concept (the title is the concept), and which happened to combine an good script, an excellent director able to get great performances, and smart enough to let them happen, and an excellent ensemble cast.
You can't MAKE that happen. It's more luck than judgment when those things come together. Attempts to do the same sort of thing, even by Disney, have not been very successful (c.f. John Carter etc.). Still, one can hope. I just think it's a bit silly.
I'm not saying the inevitable D&D movie will be successful or any good (noting that those two things don't always come together anyway). I'm just saying it makes sense for WotC to do it. There's a logic there. It holds up. It's not unfathomable.
It it attracts some hack who makes a passable summer popcorn action flick and does gangbusters (*cough*Transformers), Hasbro will be happy, anyway.
Successful and good are generally pretty closely related. The Transformers movies are the only recent ones I can think of which were successful despite being dire in pretty much every quantifiable way (except perhaps consistent visual design and SFX quality).
I think everyone would be happy if a D&D movie did that well. I would be astonished if it did. I agree that a D&D movie is inevitable, actually, but that brings us full-circle, back to what I was originally
trying to say (whether I conveyed it or not), which was that it would be very hard to get a D&D movie made that actually operated as part of a "multimedia strategy", rather than actively damaging the brand/putting people off, as I kind of feel recent D&D movies have.
