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.

 

[OB1]

2023 didn't really have an open multiweek period for any film. The glut of unreleased projects that were supposed to be in 2022 made the calendar essentially impossible to work.
Like the switch with Scream VI that Honor Among Thieves made pretty late. That would have give D&D a week before John Wick.

They did it because they wanted to premier it at SxSW and get some buzz, which they did, the reveiws coming out of the festival were great, but then they ran into the buzzsaw that was SMB and got killed. What they should have done was move it even further back into the third week of April or even June.

 

[Mistwell]

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

It's a joke, in poor taste, but also inaccurate. None of these recent fires were in a forest. They were brush fires and not forest fires.

 

[Zardnaar]

They did it because they wanted to premier it at SxSW and get some buzz, which they did, the reveiws coming out of the festival were great, but then they ran into the buzzsaw that was SMB and got killed. What they should have done was move it even further back into the third week of April or even June.

June was stacked.

April had Mario blowing up.

 

[VelvetViolet]

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.

Netflix has a history of this. Hence why I suggested a Dark•Matter series to save money. Urban Arcana could also work, if they want to have D&D monsters specifically. They could use an effect similar to “woging” from Grimm to indicate that a human actor is actually a magical creature like a drow or ogre. The Smurfs and Sonic movies are about the titular characters showing up on modern Earth (in complete violation of the source material), so why not copy that winning formula? At least this time you’re not violating the source material because Urban Arcana is specifically about D&D stuff getting isekai’d to Earth.

 

[bedir than]

They did it because they wanted to premier it at SxSW and get some buzz, which they did, the reveiws coming out of the festival were great, but then they ran into the buzzsaw that was SMB and got killed. What they should have done was move it even further back into the third week of April or even June.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3, The Little Mermaid, Fast X were all late April or early May iirc.
Heck, Honor Among Thieves was still the third biggest release of April even with its bad release slot.

 

[Zardnaar]

Guardians of the Galaxy 3, The Little Mermaid, Fast X were all late April or early May iirc.
Heck, Honor Among Thieves was still the third biggest release of April even with its bad release slot.

Forgot about GotG.

There was no good release window mMarch onwards that year. Even February wasn't great.

I still think the OPs not that big a draw. Bigger ones with even worse windows still did double HAT'S box office.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

Apparently the reason that shows typically get cancelled around their fifth season is that's when the main actors typically have enough power to lobby for big raises, which then makes episodes very expensive just as viewership has either plateaued or is falling.

(This is per Martini Shot, the long-running podcast by a former writer on Cheers who's been a showrunner for a bunch of other sitcoms since.)

 

[Desdichado]

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.

Not really. There's a lot of narrative around performance of shows, and strange claims of oddly specific metrics. That's a major red flag that actually the show isn't performing well and they're trying to pretend like it's doing better than it actually is. Checking the actual ratings is crucial. Usually, if a show is canceled its because it's not performing very well. Sometimes its because the band breaks up for whatever reason too.

 

[Chaltab]

Not really. There's a lot of narrative around performance of shows, and strange claims of oddly specific metrics. That's a major red flag that actually the show isn't performing well and they're trying to pretend like it's doing better than it actually is. Checking the actual ratings is crucial. Usually, if a show is canceled its because it's not performing very well. Sometimes its because the band breaks up for whatever reason too.

My point is that these shows find an audience, but because it's not an audience big enough to justify their budgets in the eyes of corporate overlords, they get cancelled. And Netflix primarily cares about the numbers early on (per Netflix showrunners) so if a show takes a while to find an audience, it can get axed even if it eventually picks up steam. It certainly has nothing to do with the quality of the shows.

I was making a cynical joke, but it's a very real possibility that the D&D show can find and audience but still 'underperform' by Netflix's undisclosed, esoteric metrics.

 

[Desdichado]

Then it didn't find a big enough audience. That's what you get for using Netflix, I suppose. A lower budget show on a hungrier streamer probably has a better chance.