D&D Movie/TV Paramount+ Will Not Proceed with Dungeons & Dragons Live-Action TV Show

Deadline reports that the live-action Dungeons & Dragons television series will not continue at Paramount+. The show was originally announced in January 2023 as Paramount+ placed an eight episode straight-to-series order. Normally that’s the best you can hope for in terms of a guarantee of the show happening as the show would produce the entire first season instead of needing to make a pilot to be approved.

Two big corporate changes happened since then, however. First, Hasbro sold the show’s co-producer Entertainment One to Lionsgate in December 2023 and shifted the production to Hasbro Entertainment. Currently, Paramount is searching for a buyer for the company with the current front runner according to reports being Sony Pictures, who have partnered with private equity firms to place a rumored $26 billion offer for the studio.

Little was announced about the plot other than it would be character-focused and involve the Underdark. These tidbits plus the fact that the character of Xenk from the 2023 film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was originally intended to be Drizzt Do'Urden but changed during pre-production led to speculation that the series would be an adaptation of the Drizzt novels, particularly the origin story novel Homeland.

Creator Rawson Marshall Thurber (Red Notice, Easy A, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) and showrunner Drew Crevello (The Grudge 2, WeCrashed) are still attached to the project. Hasbro will repackage and update the pitch for the show and stop it around to other distributors.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The thing is D&D takes place in a brutal time.....like before 1400 in Earth time. Everything we know of as "civilization" is like 600 years away.

Though we also don't want to peg "D&D" down to just one place in history and say "it must be exactly like this one place".

The general is a brutal world with no (American) rights. In general,,Some one just attacks and kills another...and there is no big 'legal system' or anything....people just shrug, oh another dead person.

D&D is fighting monsters...and humanoid monsters.....and that is slaughtering them. Not toss down some apples for them to trip on....killing them with weapons.

This wildly inaccurate, for the record. Laws were first written down about 4,000 years ago and explicitly cover murder and assault. They also cover property rights and crime, marriage and even pay rates for laborers.

If you want to run your games this way, feel free, but don't confuse that with actual history and actual civilization.

 

[Hussar]

You know D&D books had nudity in them at one time, right? Was that for kids?
/snip

You realize that PG-13 has nudity, drug use and graphic violence right?

 

[Hussar]

It was popular though.....

Sure you can have a PG13 kids show where the good guy has a sword and occasionally taps a foe with it and that foe then falls down on the ground to go boom and take a nap. And far more often, with the PG13 show you will see loony things like the good guy tosses a basket of apples and the foe trips and falls down.
/snip

Where are you getting this?

Hunger Games is PG 13. This is a movie about children outright murdering each other for general entertainment.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The rules of older editions were too complex for kids.

The most of PC groups work as "freelance", without a patron.

I guess it will be +7, like most of titles of Star Wars. (Are "Death Troopers" canon in Star Wars?). It shouldn't be too violent if they want to sell toys.

 

[Hussar]

The rules of older editions were too complex for kids.

The most of PC groups work as "freelance", without a patron.

I guess it will be +7, like most of titles of Star Wars. (Are "Death Troopers" canon in Star Wars?). It shouldn't be too violent if they want to sell toys.

As a kid who played back then? No, they really weren't.

Teens had no problems playing D&D back then.

Good grief, you have an entire TV show - Stranger Things - showing early teens playing AD&D. What do you think they're doing? Even back in the day, you had E.T. showing teens playing D&D. The D&D cartoon showed teens in an era where cartoon characters were almost always adults.

D&D being a teen thing is just true. It absolutely baffles me that people seem to think that D&D was some sort of "adult" hobby. It never, ever was.

 

[Oofta]

Ok.

But you can't just say anyone can just say they are "doing good" and then they can just do whatever they feel like on a whim.

And I'm not really talking about who gets to point a finger and say someone is "good or bad".

It is about having an MA TV show that depicts the harsh reality of life and death. So no..."making the orc trip on some apples and fall down", but yes to "stabbing the orc with a sword with blood and gore and killing them and dropping their dead body in the mud. "

It is not about just killing characters as they are NPC and it does not matter...like most video games. It's about having man characters with mature adult minds who will say things like they don't like all the killings.

Have you watched TV lately? Seen a movie that wasn't G rated? You don't have to have slasher movie buckets of blood, plenty of mass entertainment is for better or worse quite violent. Heck, my dad loved old westerns and people were killed by they wagonload on those. But one constant? The white hats never killed anyone "on a whim". Neither do the PCs in any D&D game I run or will continue to play.

Whether or not you want to grapple with moral dilemmas is, of course, up to you. But most games (and entertainment in general) draw pretty clean lines between good guys and bad guys since it has the luxury of not being the real world.

 

[Bedrockgames]

As a kid who played back then? No, they really weren't.

Teens had no problems playing D&D back then.

Good grief, you have an entire TV show - Stranger Things - showing early teens playing AD&D. What do you think they're doing? Even back in the day, you had E.T. showing teens playing D&D. The D&D cartoon showed teens in an era where cartoon characters were almost always adults.

D&D being a teen thing is just true. It absolutely baffles me that people seem to think that D&D was some sort of "adult" hobby. It never, ever was.

One of the things that made D&D attractive to us at that age was we felt smart for playing it I think. I started when I was in elementary school. And the appeal was this wasn't a game talking down to us or dumbed down for us. It was a game that seemed directed at older audiences but we felt like we still got it. Not saying the best versions are the most complex or anything.

That said, I don't think it is a teen game. I think it is a game written largely towards a college aged and older audience, that teens still play. Most people I know got their start in high school or college, and continued into adulthood with it. So it would be a mistake in my view to completely target the game at teens (it also misses why many of us liked it at a younger: if it had been marketed towards my age demographic more, I might have liked it less)

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The DM is who chooses the style of game. It can be darkgrimm, or supercute and child-friendly because the DM is daddy playing with his children. The fact is it can be interesteting for players of different ages or preferences. This is a serious advantage in the market because I doubt parents wanted to play World of Darkness or Call of Chulthu with their little children.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The DM is who chooses the style of game. It can be darkgrimm, or supercute and child-friendly because the DM is daddy playing with his children. The fact is it can be interesteting for players of different ages or preferences. This is a serious advantage in the market because I doubt parents wanted to play World of Darkness or Call of Chulthu with their little children.

I don't think D&D was ever in World of Darkness territory. It just isn't written towards middle schoolers or something

 

[bloodtide]

You realize that PG-13 has nudity, drug use and graphic violence right?

We don't really count the couple seconds.

Where are you getting this?

Hunger Games is PG 13. This is a movie about children outright murdering each other for general entertainment.

Good example. People get hit by weapons...and just fall down and take naps. No blood, no gore, nothing. It's just "tag".

The point is there is a big difference between Pg-13 and MA. It is why there are two separate categories. I guess your kind of saying "pg -13'' as everything? So what is left for MA? What is it that if someone rating the show would see and say "this show must be rated MA" then?

And also "Netflix MA" is a pale shadow to "Starz/Max/HBO MA". Like what did Game of Thrones have that no Netflix show will ever have? Hummmm

Neither do the PCs in any D&D game I run or will continue to play.

That is fine for you and your games.

Whether or not you want to grapple with moral dilemmas is, of course, up to you. But most games (and entertainment in general) draw pretty clean lines between good guys and bad guys since it has the luxury of not being the real world.

Ok