D&D Movie/TV Netflix Planning Forgotten Realms D&D TV Show With Stranger Things Producer

A Dungeons & Dragons TV show set in the Forgotten Realms is in development at Netflix. Deadline reports that the new TV series, titled The Forgotten Realms, is being produced by Shawn Levy, with Drew Crevello serving as writer and showrunner. No timeframe was given for the show's release. No cast has been announced and neither Hasbro nor Netflix has actually confirmed the project. If successful, the series could launch a wider D&D cinematic universe, long a goal for Hasbro.

Hasbro has tried unsuccessfully to get Dungeons & Dragons to television for several years. At one point, Paramount+ had a TV show in development with Rawson Marshall Thurber writing the pilot. While the project was ultimately scrapped, Crevello (who was set to be showrunner on that version of the show) stayed on the project and redeveloped it with a new concept. According to Deadline, this project is not tied to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, although the movie is set to debut on Netflix this month and is also set in the Forgotten Realms.

Dungeons & Dragons was also featured in an episode of Secret Level, an animated series focused on various game franchises that aired on Amazon Prime. Legendary, meanwhile, is adapting Hasbro's other major fantasy franchise Magic: The Gathering into a movie and TV project.

 

[Zardnaar]

Aside from the kids shows, everything else with long viewing times is old. Which means people have seen them before - they are in effect, reruns. People are using them as moving wallpaper whist they are doing something else. Comfortable, familiar, and requiring no concentration.

Now, no one signs up to a streaming service, in order to watch decades old reruns. But it might make them a little more reluctant to cancel when they have watched the thing they did sign up for.

Alot of that old stuff gets big money.

There's a reason people are watching it. Friends for example did well with people who weren't born yet.

Alit of the older shows are also 5-10 seasons of 20+ episodes. Several hundred million can get access to 10 seasons or 1-2 seasons of 6-10 episodes modern stuff.

Thise shows paid for themselves long ago. Pure profit these days. I think the residuals make the actors on friends some of the highest paid actors atm.

 

[Gradine]

Frozen is a D&D movie. It’s just that Disney are too cheap to pay for the licence.

Also, the main branch of Disney doesn't believe on making money off of things that aren't already in the public domain

 

[Desdichado]

Netflix? So it's going to be cancelled after 2 seasons at most and end on a cliffhanger.

Only if it sucks and underperforms.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Of all the IPs owned by Hasbro, they decided to adapt the most generic one? For a genre that has really high budgets due to all the SFX? I get that the competition isn't great, but really?

Hasbro owns Dark•Matter. Cryptids and anomalies and stuff are really popular on the internet. A DM tv show could play off that. Being set in modern times would save money on SFX. They could set it in the 80s or 90s to keep playing off that nostalgia and the analogue horror genre. Since the Hofman Institute is dedicated to science, they could introduce Nikolai Tesla and Lewis Latimer as famous agents to play off that internet popularity. The sandmen let them play off nostalgia for Star Trek because they're basically borg. There's tons of material that could be updated, like tying in the Final Church to the modern political dynasties like that one movie with Samara Weaving trying to escape satanists.

Or, idk, a Star*Drive+Star Frontiers anthology series to compete with Star Trek and Star Wars. You could include pastiches of 90s and 2000s scifi, such as a crew including a Borealian archaeologist named Jackson, an Orlamu astronaut named Crichton, and a Thuldan warlion named Anasazi. (Man, I feel old.) Considering those franchises have all been mismanaged into oblivion, Hasbro is poised to claim the entire scifi market if they wanted to.

But of course I can't expect that level of competence from a company that keeps botching the management of My Little Pony and Transformers.

 

[Gradine]

Of all the IPs owned by Hasbro, they decided to adapt the most generic popular one?

Funny how that works out

 

[bedir than]

Of all the IPs owned by Hasbro, they decided to adapt the most generic one? For a genre that has really high budgets due to all the SFX? I get that the competition isn't great, but really?

Hasbro owns Dark•Matter. Cryptids and anomalies and stuff are really popular on the internet. A DM tv show could play off that. Being set in modern times would save money on SFX. They could set it in the 80s or 90s to keep playing off that nostalgia and the analogue horror genre. Since the Hofman Institute is dedicated to science, they could introduce Nikolai Tesla and Lewis Latimer as famous agents to play off that internet popularity. The sandmen let them play off nostalgia for Star Trek because they're basically borg. There's tons of material that could be updated, like tying in the Final Church to the modern political dynasties like that one movie with Samara Weaving trying to escape satanists.

Or, idk, a Star*Drive+Star Frontiers anthology series to compete with Star Trek and Star Wars. You could include pastiches of 90s and 2000s scifi, such as a crew including a Borealian archaeologist named Jackson, an Orlamu astronaut named Crichton, and a Thuldan warlion named Anasazi. (Man, I feel old.) Considering those franchises have all been mismanaged into oblivion, Hasbro is poised to claim the entire scifi market if they wanted to.

But of course I can't expect that level of competence from a company that keeps botching the management of My Little Pony and Transformers.

Netflix is also doing a Magic The Gathering series.
Paramount has a MASK series stuck in development (its early script was by the same dudes that wrote Honor Among Thieves).

There's also several shows and movies based on other Hasbro properties coming in the next two years. Nothing about the D&D series means that Hasbro isn't working with studios on other stuff.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

Many of the outdoor scenes in the TV show Psych were filmed in the Vancouver area, but supposed to be my current hometown of Santa Barbara CA, about 160km north of Los Angeles. There was a forsest scene once, which is fine, there is in fact a forest here. But waaaay to many pine trees, clouds, and rain drops.

To be fair, it's hard to find a forest in California to film in that isn't on fire.

 

[Zardnaar]

To be fair, it's hard to find a forest in California to film in that isn't on fire.

Film it in Vancouver, New Zealand or somewhere in or near the Czech Republic.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Film it in Vancouver, New Zealand or somewhere in or near the Czech Republic.

I can think of a few other places with forests that are not on fire!

 

[Chaltab]

Only if it sucks and underperforms.

Plenty of shows have been good and done perfectly fine but got cancelled because they were too expensive. And D&D is likely to be expensive.