D&D Movie/TV Hasbro Getting Out Of The Movie Business

While Hasbro is forging ahead with its own Dungeons & Dragons video game, following the massive success of Baldur's Gate 3, the future of its film involvement is less rosy. In an article with Bloomberg featuring Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks, it was revealed that the company won't be co-financing future movies following the underperformance of Honor Among Thieves and Transformers One.

The focus is moving towards video games. Cocks said to Bloomberg, "We want to reach fans where they want to play, and increasingly that is through digital expressions of their favorite brands".

Sony and Lions Gate will continue to make movies based on Hasbro properties, but Hasbro won't be involved in the financing.

Hasbro Confirms New Unannounced Dungeons & Dragons Video Game in Development

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks has confirmed that an in-house studio is developing an unannounced Dungeons & Dragons video game. In a feature posted today on Bloomberg News, Cocks stated that Hasbro was actively developing a Dungeons & Dragons video game via one of its in-house studios. No further...

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[Gorck]

I'm thinking more like The Neverending Story or Princess Bride.
D&D is a game. They make their money selling game rules, and game dice, and game accessories. Why not make a movie where people are actually playing the game? You wouldn't have to get into rules minutia....i don't even want that when i'm playing at the table. The action and narration could be the "movie" meanwhile the interaction between the players is the the real story.

I know, was just being facetious.

But honestly, if Critical Role pared down one of their one-shots into a more theater friendly 2 hour mark, that might be able to make some good money.

 

[payn]

People sontarely go to the theaters these days, an action movie essentially rooted in Gen X/Millenial nostalgia for a beloved 80s experiwnce did not benefit by being between the viggest action movie thr prior several years and the biggest Gen X/Millenial nostalgia experience that was also parent friendly, no.

Im not entirely sure. I dont think DADHAT would do as well if it was released this weekend.

 

[mamba]

E.T. Had a scene with the kids playing D&D and I think that movie did okay.

I doubt it was the D&D scene that made it a huge hit though

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

That's fine ... though I'd argue the overall success rate of D&D games is lower than the overall success rate of movies, and the big games are equally expensive to produce. They aren't all going to be Baldur's Gates or Gold Boxes.

 

[Umbran]

They make their money selling game rules, and game dice, and game accessories. Why not make a movie where people are actually playing the game?

Because that's hard to make entertaining to people who don't already play the game.

 

[KYRON45]

Because that's hard to make entertaining to people who don't already play the game.

What they've been doing doesn't seem to be getting it done either.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Arcane at least supposedly cost as much, if not more, than a summer tent pole blockbuster.

It did, but for 2 6 hour long seasons.

It's a cheaper than, say, the previous or next seasons of Stranger Things. It was definitely a risk, but I strongly suspect once Netflix saw the first bit of animation from it, they knew they had a winner and thus it was worth doubling down on.

It's a very shallow show with almost nothing sensical to say (the text-not-even-subtext message as per right now is essentially "people do bad things for the same reasons people do good things!", which is absolutely undermined by the show's own plot, where the people doing bad things 100% are doing them out of greed, hubris, desire for control, outright megalomania, evil philosophy - i.e. get them before they get you - etc. Perhaps ironically last season it would have been a valid message, but no longer), but damn those AESTHETICS are dangerously great.

Animated series for Drizzt trilogy and Icewind Dale trilogy. Done.

If they can do it for Arcane, Vox Machina, and Twilight of the Gods, then can do a D&D story.

You could do something with Drizzt's Underdark story, so long as you totally re-wrote the specifics, and just kept the generalities (and finessed the sexism), you might even be able to make it look pretty astonishing with the Underdark, Menzoberranzan and so on.

The Icewind Dale novels though? That'd be a car crash. The story there is boring, unoriginal, cliched, problematic, and has a real lack of compelling or relatable characters (instead having some of blandest stereotypes you can imagine). That was already dodgy and frequently mocked in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2024? Even reworking couldn't save it. Plus the areas it takes place in would look vastly inferior in animation to location shooting, and unlike the Underdark/Menzoberranzan etc. there'd be no real upside to using animation over live action, cost-wise, if you you were going for Arcane levels of quality.

 

[Parmandur]

Im not entirely sure. I dont think DADHAT would do as well if it was released this weekend.

Historically, when two movies release om the theaters with any crossover audience, one suffers. They don't voost each other. And I can attest that for myself, HAT was not counterprogramming to the Mario movie: I didn't see either in theaters, but if I had to choose one it would probably have been Mario because I could have taken my kids.

 

[TiQuinn]

It did, but for 2 6 hour long seasons.

It's a cheaper than, say, the previous or next seasons of Stranger Things. It was definitely a risk, but I strongly suspect once Netflix saw the first bit of animation from it, they knew they had a winner and thus it was worth doubling down on.

I don’t know what Stranger Things cost but I thought the $150 million price tag on Arcane only was for the second season.

Compare that to Vox Machina which I’m sure was made for a fraction of that but as you mentioned, the comparison between the two visually is night and day. Arcane is Spider-verse level animation. Some of the most impressive work I’ve seen. But the main point I was eluding to is that even in animation, there’s different tiers of investment and quality. One can’t just simply go out and make another Arcane without understanding the time and money invested into that.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I thought Bumblebee was a fun movie.

The B-Bee movie was GREAT. I'm talking about his character in Transformers One