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...

www.enworld.org

 

[Ruin Explorer]

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

Nah.

Arcane showrunners defend the League of Legends spin-off's reported $250 million budget: "The money is just a reflection of the amount of effort that was put into this"

"Arcane is a really expensive animated series - which was the point"

www.gamesradar.com

The showrunners are pretty specific. It was $250m to make AND market Arcane.

Most budgets you see listed are solely the "to make" cost, with the marketing being on top of that (usually around 50% more, but it can be as low as like 10% or as high as 200% - I think Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 might even have hit 300% of the dev cost on marketing - but it paid off, that game sold insanely well).

So the actual budget-budget of Arcane was likely about $170m or so, for all 12 hours. Which is much cheaper than, say, a two-hour animated movie, which has been typically in the $150m to $250m ballpark for decades (most Disney and Pixar ones are pretty close to $200m and indeed have been since 2010).

It's expensive for an animated show, but extremely cheap for twelve hours of the quality of work we saw.

S4 of Stranger Things was $270m to make alone - marketing would be on top of that (and it got a lot of marketing). S5 is expected to cost more (the salaries of the main cast alone are over $80m! God knows how much money those kids have now!).

One can’t just simply go out and make another Arcane without understanding the time and money invested into that.

For sure and there's got to be a reason to do it. Like, the subject/story has to be inherently visually interesting and kind of require animation to do it justice. I think with the examples earlier you could fairly easily argue that for Drizzt's life in the Underdark, which is an insane-looking place populated largely by non-humans, but you couldn't argue it for the Icewind Dale Trilogy.

 

[DarkCrisis]

I still say a good D&D movie needs to have people playing D&D in it. I will die on this hill...likely cold and alone.
But by all means keep leaving the gaming part out of the script.

Just adapt this:

 

[MGibster]

Honor Among Thieves was the last movie I saw in the theater and that must have been in April or May of 2023. I keep thinking I should go see more movies but my plans almost always fall through. I planned on seeing the latest Deadpool movie but COVID prevented me from going out. Then I figured it was going to be streaming soon so I just held off on going. I've got the funds and the time to go see movies but I just can't be bothered to for some reason.

I did enjoy HAT though and thought it was a delightful, light hearted romp. Would a sequel be nice? Sure. But I can live without one. Maybe an original story again might be nice? I don't blame Hasbro for getting out of the movie business. The funny thing is that Hasbro got their start selling furniture only later pivoting to toys. But sometimes things just don't work out as you hoped and you've got to decide where to direct your efforts for maximum effect.

Maybe they can license out the D&D name to studios who want to produce movies or television shows. As much as I enjoyded HAT, I think I would have enjoyed it just as much if you removed all the D&Disms. It could have been a generic fantasy movie with all human characters and I think I would have been just as happy.

 

[Von Ether]

Ah. That explains this auction as well.

And really $3M is pocket change but I also assume Hasbro would rather get rid of the overhead for storage.

Hasbro Plundered Its Power Rangers Vaults for Just $3.3 Million

The now-concluded auction of costumes and memorabilia upset fans and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers actors when it was announced.

gizmodo.com

 

[Superchunk77]

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.

The stories are fine as is. Just make the series rated R like Twilight of the Gods did. It will never happen though because WotC is targeting a much younger audience these days.

I don't share your take on Icewind Dale....at all.

 

[payn]

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

Ohhh ok. I havent caught T1 yet.

 

[SteveC]

Not really surprising news, considering how the movie did. I'm sad because I really did enjoy it and wanted to see more. I am amused beyond belief that they are taking games back in house. If making movies is too hard, I wonder how they think that video games will be.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The stories are fine as is. Just make the series rated R like Twilight of the Gods did.

What would that even do for it? Let them make the fights bloodier? I can't see anything else.

They're fundamentally really tame stories with the most stereotypical possible characters. Drizzt's personality is "Generic Good Guy people are unfair to" (unlike the Underdark stuff, where there's more nuance - though not much), Bruenor's personality is "Generic Dwarf", Wulfgar's personality is "Generic Dwarf (Younger)" which might a be a good gag except Discworld did it way better with Carrot (who may be a loose satire of Wulfgar and similar characters on a certain level), Regis' personality in the three IWD books (not the bizarre later turn he took) is "Generic Comedy Coward", and worst of all Catti-Brie, who doesn't even appear at all until the second book (!!!), has the personality "Generic Love Interest", right down to being frequently helpless and getting kidnapped.

There's nothing wrong with liking those stories - everyone likes some pretty lame and cliched media really! But let's not pretend these are stories with potential appeal or traction with a wide audience in 2024 or later. They were dated by the time they came out, and did not age well.

 

[Zaukrie]

I still say a good D&D movie needs to have people playing D&D in it. I will die on this hill...likely cold and alone.
But by all means keep leaving the gaming part out of the script.

Couldn't disagree more. I want a fantasy movie.

 

[Zaukrie]

I still think animation TV shows are the right approach.

I wonder if HAT would have done better without the DnD branding?