A submission contest, like the one that resulted in the publication of Eberron, would be a pretty cool idea for coming up with a D&D movie plot. Unfortunately, it won't happen any time soon--but not for any of the reasons cited in this thread. Let me give you a little bit of the scoop on the D&D movie saga.
Background: Many years ago, TSR (this was before WotC) licensed the rights to the D&D movie. The contract did not give TSR (and its successor, WotC) much ability to contribute to or oversee the movie, and the license basically can't be revoked and won't expire any time soon. So the licensee can basically make whatever movie they want, and we have very little ability to do anything about it. If it sounds to you like TSR made a pretty crappy deal for themselves, well, it sounds that way to us, too, but that's simply the reality of the situation.
So the licensee made the first film, and we all know how that turned out. We had nothing to do with the making of that movie (though at the last minute they asked us to help market it, which we did a little bit).
The licensee then basically transfered the license to another production company--Silver Pictures. You may have heard of them--they produced The Matrix among many other noteworthy films. Silver Pictures figured that, despite the horror that was the first D&D movie, they might be able to rebuild the credibility of the D&D brand in Hollywood. They weren't willing to lay out the huge budget of the first film, but they were willing to make a moderately-budgeted film for DVD release. If it seemed like it was a better, more popular movie, they could then make one or more additional films with larger budgets and bigger release aspirations.
Again, WotC had no voice in any of these decisions. But, that was about to change!
Where We Are Now: Again, Silver Pictures could make any movie they wanted, without our input. But they figured we might know something about what makes D&D, well, D&D, so they asked us for our input. They already had a script, and we were able to help them make the script more D&D-ish. We were able to send a representative to the filming location, and to provide a lot of tips on costumes, sets, effects, and so on. They took a lot of our advice. They also ignored a fair bit of it.
I haven't seen the final film, but I have seen a couple versions in rough cut. (In other words, versions that didn't have final editing, effects, music, and in some cases dialog.) I can't tell you difinitively how good or bad this movie will be. But I can tell you this:
The movie is much more true to D&D and the D&D experience than the first movie.
The movie is much better than the first movie, in my opinion (though that doesn't necessarily say much).
So now you know pretty much all there is to know about the D&D movie and its upcoming sequel. Will the second movie be great? Maybe, but you'll get no guarantees from me. Will it be a much better D&D movie? Almost certainly. Will the fans ever get a chance to submit their ideas for a future D&D movie? Not right away, but if this movie is better (and better received) than the first one, you never know what the future might hold.
