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.

 

[timbannock]

It's telling that things like The Dragon Prince and a Critical Role animated series are hugely popular and get greenlit for multiple seasons at a time while D&D: HAT was seen as a disappointment and Dragonlance isn't considered to have the cultural cache to be greenlit in the first place.

I think D&D as a brand is wildly overinflated in value, D&D the game is reflective of the value in the gaming industry that is mostly unrealized but also not really transferable outside of next-door industries like video games (proven by BG3), and the real value for film/books is in new properties.

Heck, I'd love to see a comparison of sales of the Stranger Things and Rick & Morty starter sets compared to the Dragonlance adventure and/or board game. They certainly aren't apples to apples, but I'm just saying it'd be really interesting to see what that looks like. Same with the Exandria book versus them.

TL;DR: I think "D&D" has a ton of cultural cache for gamers, but I don't think the individual settings really have much value outside of the aging members of that audience. Newer settings and properties might be better business, but it's arguable if that goes both ways (to or from games and other multimedia).

 

[GrimCo]

It's both. Obviously. But it's very much D&D, as is Delicious in Dungeon.

Yes. Legend of Vox Machina is D&D. Delicious in Dungeon is definetly D&D. They maybe don't have D&D logo slapped on them, but in essence, they are D&D. Hell, my latest character, human fighter with Chef feat is very much like Laios, and i can count at lest 3 characters my brother played over the years that are more or less Senshi.

Cartoons are way to go since they appeal to both kids and adults.

For F sake, Hasbro practically invented marketing tehnique of using cartoons as long advertisements for their products. Most of the cool 80/90 Saturday morning cartoons were effectively 30 min long adverts for Hasbro toys.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

If there was a time when either Got or HP weren't generic fantasy, that time was at least 25-30 years ago. For the entire 21st century, both grimdark edgelord and wizard school have been wildly more common than traditional heroic high fantasy.

This is the opinion of someone invested in fantasy fiction.

At a TV studio, where they don't give a crap about such things, "generic fantasy" means "scrappy band travels overland (through an East European country posing as Fantasyland) accompanied by a wizard, on a quest." Amazon has two of those and neither of them is a big hit. Disney+ cancelled theirs. Dragonlance, as much as this obviously pains some people (including certain Magic Mike cast members), is essentially the same thing.

"Yes, but this one has a knight with a droopy mustache" isn't going to meaningfully differentiate Dragonlance for a TV studio from three flops or near-flops.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I just want people to stop making the silly statement that studio execs nixed it because the board game. That’s all. I sure they had solid business reasons.

What mysterious oracles do you think they consult other than Googling "Dragonlance sales?" Pitch meetings usually take less than two hours and most decisions, realistically, are made in much shorter times than that. They're not commissioning surveys or opinion polls in order to decide on the multiple pitches they hear every day.

WotC screwed up their most recent Dragonlance products -- in part, by releasing them at the end of a year where they did everything possible to make their audience mad at them -- and that almost certainly helped tank the deal.

The other data point is, as said, that all the products that look comparable and were already on streamers were doing incredibly poorly, which suggests to the studios that the audience just isn't there for them, since they have to assume that at least one of them did a good job. (Not necessarily the case, but nobody's got the time to watch everything on streaming.)

 

[Incenjucar]

For a big expensive show D&D needs a story that is compelling to a broad contemporary audience. It doesn't have the writers for that. Even things like Pern haven't managed that.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

For a big expensive show D&D needs a story that is compelling to a broad contemporary audience. It doesn't have the writers for that. Even things like Pern haven't managed that.

Pern is a great example. It was huge in the 1970s, fell off in the 1980s, and many nerds today not only have never read it, many of them have never even heard of it. (Binging Um, Actually during the pandemic made me feel a million years old, seeing all of the 1970s nerd icons that 21st century nerds had never heard of.)

Getting a Pern project off the ground is hard, because there's no way to meaningfully leverage "we loved this stuff back in 1978" and, instead, it has to go up against every other fantasy project studios get pitched, many of which have easier premises to understand in the narrow time allotted by executives than "well, it looks like fantasy, but it's actually science fiction, and they can breed dragons but don't have a laser gun or a forcefield to take care of the threads, which are actually invading aliens."

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

Pern is a great example. It was huge in the 1970s, fell off in the 1980s, and many nerds today not only have never read it, many of them have never even heard of it.

Not to mention, I can't be the only person who was way into Pern in its heyday but if the subject comes up around me now I mutter something about tent pegs.

 

[Incenjucar]

Even Drizz't has fallen out of reference these days. We need a fresh hit, not an ancient one. Even Game of Thrones would probably be ignored if it had been pitched ten years after the novel series concluded.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

My opinion about the cartoon movie is it was too violent to be watched by children, and the original novel was too long to be told in only 90 minutes. But I loved that 80's style.

Other option could be the "reboot", the Dragonlance of 5 Ed is not the same "wildspace" of 2nd age, something like the James Bond played by Sean Conery is not the same canon than the 007 played by Daniel Craig. If I am not wrong now the parallel universes are canon in the 5 Ed.

My suggestion? A pilot episode working as a spin-off, with a different group of characters, maybe even in a different time.

But the challenge is the new Dragonlance should be rewritten to can add the new elements from later editions, for example the sorcerers and warlocks (and after the psionic mystics).

 

[Zardnaar]

Eddings and Feist, sure, but I won't stand for this Gemmell slander. He's a bit popcorn pulp, but good at that. And his Troy series was genuinely good good.

Didn't mind Gemmel as much he's aged better and still like Feist Magician and Empire trilogy. They're just not as good. Eddings was a bit rougher enjoyed the Elenium still.

All better than Dragonlance just gave up reading it.