D&D Movie/TV Joe Manganiello: Dragonlance TV Show No Longer In Development

Actor Joe Manganiello has confirmed that the anticipated Dragonlance TV show that he had been working on is no longer being developed. In an interview with ComicBook.com. According to Manganiello, following poor sales of Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen and the Warriors of Krynn board game last year, "Dragonlance is not a property [WotC] are interested in developing further currently". This decision was also prompted by Hasbro's sale of its media studio, eOne.

In March last year, Manganiello confirmed during an official D&D video update that he was working on a TV show for WotC, and a D&D live action series was greenly by Paramount in January. It's not clear if these are the same property.

Manganiello also talked about his approach to the property, and the new designs he had for the world, the dragons, and even the casting. "I want to make [the show] because I want to see it and I just want to feel that excited and electric about something. The characters...like the casting, I have a look book with over 1,000 pages, but it's not what you expect. The design concepts I had for the world, for the armor, for the swords....I had a fresh take on what the dragons were going to look like, it was going to be nothing like anyone has ever seen."

He has been working on a script for years, and was told by TV executives that his pilot was one of the best fantasy scripts they had ever read. He even offered to buy Dragonlance from WotC.

You can watch the whole interview at the link above.

 

[Parmandur]

I'm just going to take a moment here to lol at the idea of GRRM's writing being good. The man can come up with decent stories (though, like most fantasy writers, easily falls into pointless rambling instead of actually finishing them), but the writing itself is just painfully bad. And Jordan is worse. I couldn't even get through the first chapter of WoT.

Martin has become somewhat overrated, but he is an excellent writer, certainly better than any who has written any D&D tie-in novels (no offense to the people who have at all). Jordan was a master of the craft, maybe give him the whole chapter. I wasn't just able to make it through the first chapter, but all 15 novels multiple times, and they hold up stupendous well by any standard.

I think you're spot-on with all of these observations. Including and especially your thoughts on Jordan

No, just...no.

But more importantly, unless the show was actually terrible (I have no idea if we can trust Joe to be objective or not, probably not) I think it would have had every chance of being successful. Oh well.

It had a pretty good chance of being quality...but as Honor Among Thieves shows, that ia not necessarily enough, and it would require large stakes at the table.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The big deal is having a cleric again that can perform miracles / cast spells after centuries

So, the moral is, gods are all about getting power.

 

[Parmandur]

I think the plot and basic concepts in the Dragonlance books are pretty solid. The dialogue is atrocious and the prose amateurish, but those aren't obstacles to a TV or movie adaptation. The terrible dialogue is almost a wash, because you won't feel like you're losing anything you cut.

This here is exactly why Dragonlance always felt like a good candidate for adaptation: good bones, room for improvement.

 

[Remathilis]

I think that's short-sighted. A curated list of options makes a setting more manageable, more unique, and more interesting to a lot of people. It's not likely to damage the sales of other products.

When you're only likely to give a setting a single book (so as not to support multiple lines, which you're right that they don't want to do) then you're more free to make each self-contained, not less.

Curated lists are for DMs, not WotC, to decide.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

From a studio standpoint, I don't really think there's much to differentiate Dragonlance from any other fairly vanilla fantasy world that has dragons and heroic adventurers in it. That sales of the latest project were underwhelming seems like a perfectly plausible reason for them to shrug and not expect this to do any better than Amazon Prime's "Wheel of Time" which, to a layperson, is also a pretty generic fantasy adventure.

(The ways these worlds are different and omg, how can you say they're generic, are pretty subtle to everyone not deeply invested in fantasy worlds. And "do a generic fantasy world, but do a better job than Amazon Prime did" isn't a compelling argument to make to a studio, which will never cop to anyone dropping the ball with the material.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The problem with this logic is for a tv show to be successful it has to attract a broad audience so using the sales of the DL adventure as a gauge has no value. The true power of the story is probably better reflected in orginal 3 books that sold millions of copies world wide. That is the story that would be best adapted and sold to audience across the country not anything related to the 5E adventure. To me it would be the equivalent of HBO not doing GoT because a Westeros coloring book sold poorly.

They did Game of Thrones because the novels sold spectacularly.

Studios need something more concrete to go on than "the tertiary romantic lead from True Blood and one of the Magic Mikes really likes these novels." Sales is obviously what they'd go off of.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

lol my son loves the dragon lance books, but he’s a stupid kid, what does he know

I'm sorry about his divorce from Sofia Vegara. Did she at least let him keep the sweet game room?

 

[jerryrice4949]

From a studio standpoint, I don't really think there's much to differentiate Dragonlance from any other fairly vanilla fantasy world that has dragons and heroic adventurers in it. That sales of the latest project were underwhelming seems like a perfectly plausible reason for them to shrug and not expect this to do any better than Amazon Prime's "Wheel of Time" which, to a layperson, is also a pretty generic fantasy adventure.

(The ways these worlds are different and omg, how can you say they're generic, are pretty subtle to everyone not deeply invested in fantasy worlds. And "do a generic fantasy world, but do a better job than Amazon Prime did" isn't a compelling argument to make to a studio, who will never cop to anyone dropping the ball with the material.)

I think the term ‘generic fantasy’ has lost any meaning to me. It is just such a subjective term. What isn’t generic fantasy?

 

[Mannahnin]

Curated lists are for DMs, not WotC, to decide.

Curated lists are entirely appropriate for campaign settings. DMs can certainly choose to use a published campaign setting or not. And they can modify one if they want to.

Curated campaign settings may be better-suited for smaller, third party publishers than to a mass market publisher like WotC which tries to have a relatively sedate pace of releases and wants those releases to appeal widely. But having a campaign setting or two which limit options or substitute new ones is perfectly reasonable and potentially desirable as part of making the setting distinctive and flavorful and providing a different play experience than other campaign settings.

 

[Incenjucar]

I think the term ‘generic fantasy’ has lost any meaning to me. It is just such a subjective term. What isn’t generic fantasy?

Dark Sun. Planescape. Spelljammer.