Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2011)

[Dannyalcatraz]

Your idea has merit if you focus on one character, Drizzt for instance would probably be a good one to start with, telling about his crawl out of the underdark, maybe introducing one or two other characters in a limited capacity and then building on it. But you are banking a lot on the success of the first one to continue to generate income for any sequels, and as we saw with the first one, one misstep causes the whole thing to become a niche project.

And after his 3 year stint in the Fed's Tax Pen, Wesley Snipes will portray that role with a depth that will earn him an OSCAR!

Really, though, I think they should *ahem* redeem the D&D movie brand name a bit by going small screen: a good, well scripted miniseries or series that can launch the occasional major miniseries or TV movie, and THEN a big screen adaptation.*

Ancient Alcatrazian Secret: First learn walk, then learn run.




* Marvel Comics did this, most recently with Mutant X, a thinly veiled reworking of the X-Men books...

 

[Ahnehnois]

I wouldn't watch that if you paid me, I think Weis & Hickman are hacks. I realize I am in the minority, but considering the lack of D&D movie support so far, every ticket counts, so you cannot polarize your audience.

You're not the only one. To be fair I've only read one Dragonlance book many years ago, but I never found any of the D&D-based novels very interesting. They may or may not have any merit but D&D is about creating your own stories.

...which is part of the problem in creating a successful D&D movie. When they made the LoTR series, they had one fairly unified set of source material to work from, and they produced an interpretation that a large number of people found acceptably faithful. In contrast, there's no agreement as to what is good in D&D or even what D&D is; it's a very fractured fan base. When they made the first movie, 3e was a reasonably obvious choice, but now it's not clear what edition you'd base it on.

Personally, I don't want a D&D movie based on the novels, I don't want one that has anything to do with 4e, and I don't want one that's PG-13. Of course, these are all things that make movies marketable. They already tried making an "original" movie and they blew it. No one is likely to put big money towards that again and small money is not going to make a great movie. Here's hoping for Baldur's Gate: the Movie...

 

[Knightfall]

FYI... the IMDb page notes that the movie is now in post-production.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Which means it will be in pre-immolation any time now!

 

[GSHamster]

Plus, Will Ferrell isn't funny. Ever.

I'm not a big fan of most of his movies, but Stranger than Fiction is quite good.

Similarly with Adam Sandler, Punch-Drunk Love and Reign Over Me were very nice, and I admit to having a soft spot for Happy Gilmour and The Wedding Singer.

 

[Kzach]

I still haven't even bothered to watch the second one, despite having it given to me as an owner of a DVD rental store. I never bothered to put it on the shelf either 'cause I didn't think it was worth the $0.15 for the security tag and lockable case.

Hell, I wouldn't even waste bandwidth downloading it. I highly doubt that number three in this series is going to warrant any more attention than the previous two.

 

[Klaus]

D&D 2 was no worse than a 90-minute episode of Hercules or Xena. It still had many flaws, but it also had Ellie Chidzley as Lux the Barbarian, and that's okay in my book!

 

[Quickleaf]

D&D 2 was no worse than a 90-minute episode of Hercules or Xena. It still had many flaws, but it also had Ellie Chidzley as Lux the Barbarian, and that's okay in my book!

Well she can't portray a skilled warrior but she sure can play a stripper/writing critic.

"All I'm saying is that if you can't fit your idea into the first line then it's too diffuse."

 

[OpsKT]

I saw this movie last night on SyFy. It was glorious in how terrible it was.

First off, during the knighting ceremony (err, Paladin... Knight is a fighter, no gods required) you could see the looks of the guys faces every tiime they called out to Pelor. It was the 'Who the writes this ' look.

Later on, he literally goes to a store called the Adventurer's Vault, and buys things by referencing tiers, I kid you not.

"And that suit of knight armor."

"Heroic or Paragon?"

"Paragon." {With a look that says I have no idea what this means}

Oh, yeah, whores in Points of Light must get paid really well, cause our hero gets his paid for by the helpful whore. Yeah.

How did we have a Shadar'kai with no mention of the Raven Queen once? Unless I missed it in the horrible dialog.

The SHadowfell looked cool, except for the fact that it looked more like the elemental chaos raped the abyss and then deposited their baby on the Shadowfell's doorstep. The Shadowfell is a dark reflection of the world, not floating islands, last I knew.

Yeah, it's terrible. There was a sex scene that SyFy did the blurry bits for, that implies this was supposed to be direct to video. But it still doesn't help. Also, since when were Shadar'kai females fans of 50 Shades of Grey?

 

[Gomezaddams51]

I watched it and found it to be entertaining. In watching it, I found myself thinking that it would be cool to join that little mercenary group...they were my kind of "people". It would be fun to play an D&D RPG with party members like that... I was trying to figure out what classes they were. The one was a Paladin, one was an assassin, not sure what type the two mages were though and what the blue guy was supposed to be.

I have enjoyed all the D&D movies so far. I take them for what they are, entertainment. I don't expect them to be actual D&D movies that follow the rules exactly. It would be nice for someone to take some of the modules and make a movie out of them but I doubt it will ever happen. So I take what I can get.