There are already a million terrible generic fantasy films. Why make one called Dungeons & Dragons unless it represents the game as actually played? I don't want to see generic human bad guys, huge pitched battles, or love interests. I want to see five PCs fighting a displacer beast in a cave somewhere. I want to see the characters perform a full cavity search on their slain opponents to recover every last copper piece. I want to see the Shrine of the Kuo-toa or the Slave Pits of the Undercity. And I want to see the PCs bickering over minutiae.
Dungeons & Dragons is merely a game engine. I want to see a movie about a campaign setting. What is wrong about the first two films is that they don't take advantage of all the great lore that has been built up for the various settings, and instead the D&D movies create a new setting. There has been some
talk at The Piazza about the setting of the first two movies. I'm still wondering if Book of Vile Darkness is supposed to be set on the same world.
I want to see an intro like Game of Thrones has, that shows the map of a fantasy world and I want to see a fairly faithful adaptation of a known story like Peter Jackson did.
I'd love to see some iconic stuff added in as background detail, like a CGI version of the City of Greyhawk, The Tears of Selune, Solamnic Knight armour and other details that a fan would recognise (alongside a stonkingly good plot of course).
There are a number of good stories in D&D. I thought that the animated Dragonlance movie was not as bad as it was made out to be and think that Chronicles could be made into a really great trillogy of films, given the right director. The story is a bit similar to Lord of the Rings, in parts, but Chronicles has the main characters riding dragons at times, and that would be a great excuse for great special effects shots (showing both the dragons and the countryside of Ansalon). In fact,
Chronicles could ride on LotR's coat-tails, by using the Massive software to help make the big battles work.
Forgotten Realms is one of the biggest D&D campaign settings, and I know a lot of people would want to see a Drizzt film. But one story I would personally like to see brought to the screen is
Blades of the Moonsea, because that trilogy has both a Spelljammer side-trek and a Planescape side-trek that would show Toril in the context of the D&D Multiverse. Many D&D worlds look superficially similar to other fantasy worlds (at first glance) but these bits would be a great way to show something non-standard.
I don't know I'm not interested in a pure dungeon crawling movie. I hate it at my table, so I won't pay for such a thing.
I think that a lot of dungeon crawls are fairly relentless (combat, combat, combat) and that what you need in a film is variety. Dungeons really need to have a "personality" to be something that the viewers can think of as an antagonist (rather than just be a character eating machine). Perhaps Undermountain might work if you could sell the story of it.
Also making a D&D movie is quite hard since everybody has a different opinion on what makes D&D, so unless they go for an adaptation of a novel series I don't think it will work.
Yep. We should not be having D&D moview. We should be having a Forgotten Realms movie a Greyhawk movie and a Dragonlance movie. As prices lower, WotC should be going down the line of IPs and making a movie for each one.
Even something that seems to be unpopular, like Jakandor, could work as a low budget movie, with the right script. Imagine a Conan-like figure fighting undead. People that like zombie movies might like a film like that. And it could, of course, throw in the twist of a good guy character that gets killed and then brought back as an undead bad guy.
Do you know how to make an ass-kicking D&D movie?! Bring Vin F'ing Diessel and make him star AND direct it. He has stated before that he is a D&D fan. Also, he was on the design team of those Riddik games that got very good reviews.
Vin Diesel with a bad script would still be bad. He would need to be able to choose the story. If they gave him the cash and told him to pick his favourite D&D novel, that might work.
But, to be honest, I think that Paizo should snap him up and get him to make a Pathfinder movie.
Other than that, yeah, make a good Drizzt movie and watch the nerds give you money (Myself included!).
They could probably turn Drizzt into a TV series that runs for 10 years. That might earn them more money.
I would rather watch Krull til my eyes bled than whatever the hell that piece of garbage is.
Krull has some pretty good bits. If it had been given a bit of a rewrite, it could have been brilliant.
Even the worst D&D Movie is better than
Dragon. That film was so awful (and not funny awful) that I've went to the effort of putting a review up on Amazon.co.uk to try to stop anyone else wasting their money on it.
