Grace Randolph is worse than Ain’t it Cool News or Giant Freaking Robot.
I looked her up, not really having heard of her, and "Oh... my god..." (as per Pitch Meetings) is really my only possible response.
I don't think she's actually worse than AICN, because she's not like, a sex offender in addition to making stuff up and refusing to admit it's made up, but wow she really likes get into fights and then get utterly dumpstered/faceplanted by the facts, huh? Wow.
Pitch guy: So, I want the next D&D movie to include Drizzt!
Studio money guy: Who?
PG: Drizzt! The most famous successful D&D character ever, he's been in like 30 New York Times bestsellers!
SMG: Still never heard of him. But 30 bestsellers ... you have my attention. Who is this guy?
PG: He's the one good member of an evil race of elves, you can tell they're evil because they're black while all the good elves are white. But his black-skinned race rejects him for his good ways, and he has to flee black elf society and make a new home with a bunch of white-skinned blond- or red-headed kinda-Nordic people who understand goodness!
SMG: ...
PG: [expectant grin]
SMG: ...
SMG: You're high, right?
Drizzt is formative for me. 14yo me reading Drizzt novels is the reason 40something year old me is posting on this website. I grew out of the books eventually, but they still have a special place in my heart. But the Drizzt backstory just ain't gonna fly in 2023. Maybe you could include him as a cameo, or in a background scene as an easter egg like the cartoon characters were. But even then, it's not without complexities. For instance, to have anything resembling the traditional drow charcoal skin tone, you'd probably need to put an actor in something uncomfortably resembling blackface.
I love this, but I think Drizz't
could be done.
That's a different question as to whether it
should be, of course.
You would, however, need to massage things quite a bit. Like a lot. Here are my suggestions:
1) You go with the modern post-2000 Drow look, which is skin somewhere between slate and pale grey, sometimes purple-ish, probably usually mid-grey. You just
cannot do the "blackface" look, no matter how hard you try that will end in tears 100%.
2) You do NOT introduce go all in on Drizz't's childhood in Menzoberranzan or Menzoberrazan at all. You start on the surface, and you use flashbacks and/or Drizz't having to return to the Underdark to talk about that. You also push things away from the kinky-abusive to the just plainly abusive.
3) You introduce non-Lolthian Drow societies at the same time as or even before really going for the Lolthian ones, and you make out that the Lolthian ones aren't the norm/default. This is now lore-correct AFAIK, or close enough.
4) With surface elves, you go hard on their Forgotten Realms skin tones - i.e. Moon Elves are often blue-ish, Sun Elves are golden-skinned and some dark-skinned with a golden sheen and so on. You make sure you don't end up in some places where surface elves are just "white people with pointy ears".
5) Redo Drizz't's buddies to be a bit more diverse, honestly I don't think anyone is that attached to them except Bruenor and maybe Catti-Brie.
6) For god's sake age up Catti-Brie so it doesn't look like she's being groomed since she was about fifteen (!!!) by a 100+ year-old elf.
7) Probably age-down Drizz't - I think it's canon that elves are adults by 20-ish and only TREATED as children/childish by other elves until they're like 100, rather than then literally not being adults until 100 (which was always totally nuts). Make them both mid-20s or something.
8) Don't like, mindlessly stick to the books - most TV based on books has realized this now - and often corrects mistakes of the books. It's been happening since stuff like True Blood and Vampire Diaries in the early '00s, both of which were drastically better than the books. Use material, characters, events, and so on from them, but don't feel beholden to them.
All that said, probably best not to lol.
