D&D Movie/TV Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith Join D&D Movie

Dire Bare said:

To you.

I love Eberron's magic trains . . . . I don't think they belong in an introductory film for D&D. Eberron is pure awesome, but it stretches what D&D is into new genre territory. After a successful series of "basic" D&D films, then I hope the franchise has enough interest to get us an Eberron movie or 10, plus perhaps some Dark Sun, Planescape, maybe even Spelljammer cinematic goodness.

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Personally, I disagree with all of this. Magic trains is as much D&D as crashed spaceships, dinosaur infested islands, a six-shooting hero-diety, airships, a giant robot, not-so-giant-robots, Rube Goldberg machines made by mad gnomes, nuclear reactors, Wonderland rip-off demiplanes, and so on. Magic trains are pretty mundane campared to the Mighty Servant of Leuk-o, Alphatian airships, tinker gnome creations, etc. Eberron is just a more modern (well mostly, it was all done before by the time it came out almost 20 years ago) take on fantasy than LotR and Conan.

While I fully realize that the D&D movie won't be set in Eberron (I'm not that lucky), an Eberron-based movie would be perfectly D&D without feeling like a LotR-wannabe and more internally consistent than most of the other vanilla settings.

Azzy said:

Personally, I disagree with all of this. Magic trains is as much D&D as crashed spaceships, dinosaur infested islands, a six-shooting hero-diety, airships, a giant robot, not-so-giant-robots, Rube Goldberg machines made by mad gnomes, nuclear reactors, Wonderland rip-off demiplanes, and so on. Magic trains are pretty mundane campared to the Mighty Servant of Leuk-o, Alphatian airships, tinker gnome creations, etc. Eberron is just a more modern (well mostly, it was all done before by the time it came out almost 20 years ago) take on fantasy than LotR and Conan.

While I fully realize that the D&D movie won't be set in Eberron (I'm not that lucky), an Eberron-based movie would be perfectly D&D without feeling like a LotR-wannabe and more internally consistent than most of the other vanilla settings.

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Mostly all in modules eg niche.

You don't like Depeche Mode?

Dire Bare said:

To you.

I love Eberron's magic trains . . . . I don't think they belong in an introductory film for D&D. Eberron is pure awesome, but it stretches what D&D is into new genre territory. After a successful series of "basic" D&D films, then I hope the franchise has enough interest to get us an Eberron movie or 10, plus perhaps some Dark Sun, Planescape, maybe even Spelljammer cinematic goodness.

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No, the post I replied to simply made no sense. It was incoherent, beginning nowhere and using no reasoning to arrive at nothing.

What you describe is extremely far-fetched, and doesn’t even follow. There is no basic D&D , nor any need for a first movie to be basic anything (and indeed aiming for basic will hobble the movie), nor does the notion that any sort of “simplest form of D&D needs to be established in order to then add other parts of D&D” hold any water.

Eberron is not a weird setting, to a modern audience. It’s just fantasy. Very very very D&D fantasy.

Zardnaar said:

Mostly all in modules eg niche.

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By many, you mean three. Still, that's irrelevant.

Azzy said:

By many, you mean three. Still, that's irrelevant.

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Such things exist here and there. They're not really defining aspects of D&D.

I feel like fantasy with a modern take hasn't historically done very well in Hollywood.

Having traumatic memories of the recent Robin Hood movie and Wild Wild West.

I'd be happy with recasting the plot of Baldur's gate 1.

Ruin Explorer said:

He'd be pressed to explain that DC and Marvel are separate - I think he knows Superman is not in the same universe as Spider-Man, that's about it.

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My mother-in-law continues to operate under the assumption that Chris Pine's character in Wonder Woman was Captain America.

I am hopelessly optimistic, but "hope for the best, plan for the worst" is my personal and professional mantra. I think that this project has a lot of things going against it, but there are two key elements that are huge red flags from my vantage point.

The biggest one is that finding the sweet spot between what D&D players want, and what general audiences are going to spend money on is a Sisyphean task. Hell, try to find the sweet spot of the D&D players on the last 15 pages of this thread and see what you end up with. My fear is that with the studios trying to appeal to everyone to maximize their profits, we'll end up with the typical art-by-committee-and-test-group slop that everyone will pay to see, but that no one will like.

The second is the phrase "D&D, but subversive." That makes me imagine a movie of gamer stereotypes and nerd jokes.

My assumption (and I think mostly fear) for a while has been that the magic bullet they were going to attempt would be a mashup of the old 80's cartoon, the tried and true "normal people who discover a magic world" trope, and a liberal dash of West World/Ready Player One/Tron/Dream Park. Someone makes a super popular D&D augmented reality game and it's the new football. Jocks dominate, but when the AI takes over/becomes self aware/attempts to turn the world into paperclips, the nerds are the ones who have to step up and save the day because they're the only ones who have the DMG and MM memorized.

CubicsRube said:

I'd be happy with recasting the plot of Baldur's gate 1.

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Given that the plot of BG1 is ripped from Star Wars that could work...