D&D Movie/TV First Footage of D&D Honor Among Thieves: Dungeons, Dragons, Teamwork, With Superhero Vibe

EN World member OB1 saw some of the first footage of next year's Dungeons & Dragon movie, Honor Among Thieves, confirming "dungeons, Dragons, and party teamwork with a bit of a superhero movie vibe". The roughly 30-seconds of footage was shown as part of Paramount's promotional reel played at CinemaCon.

Here is a quick hit of what I saw. Note that the 30 seconds or so was split up over 7 or 8 smaller shots interspersed in a larger product reel for other Paramount product. I was focusing hard to recognize when they were showing Dad Hat (All credit to my co-worker for realizing that the title shortens to Dad Hat) footage, but it made it very tricky to really get the details for the scenes. I will say that the overall look was absolutely amazing for being this far out. Easily on par with what you would expect from a Marvel theatrical release. Costumes all looked good, sets all looked good.

• Chris Pine on horseback riding next to Michele Rodriguez talking about 'needing a team for this'
• A blue? dragon flying overhead away from camera while characters flee underneath on horseback
• A big city, I'm guessing Waterdeep, from an overhead, aerial view
• Sophia Lillis (I think) pulling back on a slingshot wristband to fire something (there were two moments of this)
• Big action sequence in an outdoor arena like setting with pillars growing out of the ground that some heroes jump across while others fire off bows/magic,etc
• Rege-Jean Page on horseback heading towards some ruins, reminded me of something straight out of an old module but I can't put my finger on which one. Sort of half, simple stone wall buildings on a hilltop spread out over 100 meters or so
• A character in a long shot (I think Chris Pine but not sure as it was very quick) dancing? under an archway - reminded me more of being under Otto's Irresistible Dance than something he was doing on purpose. On the flip side, it could be a bard character spellcasting as I think he had an instrument in his hands (sorry bard haters)
• A spell that felt like a wizard casting shield against an attack. I think it was Rege-Jean but can't be certain.
• Don't remember seeing Hugh Grant in the footage, and no plot details
• Definitely had a fun, action packed vibe to it. Definitely not grim-dark

As for the superhero vibe I got, yeah, it felt somewhat like a fantasy version of Guardians of the Galaxy. I could imagine the marketing campaign for this leaning into this is Marvel meets Game of Thrones as a way to make the concept accessible to a larger audience not fully familiar with D&D style medieval fantasy.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Saw this earlier today. Now, which one will be the most successful?

It will be Transformers, because the sheep always flock to the established franchise.

 

[Audiomancer]

Saw this earlier today. Now, which one will be the most successful?

And here I thought we already HAD a Rock-‘em-Sock-em Robots movie:

Real Steel (2011) - IMDb

Real Steel: Directed by Shawn Levy. With Hugh Jackman, Dakota Goyo, Evangeline Lilly, Anthony Mackie. In the near future, robot boxing is a top sport. A struggling ex-boxer feels he's found a champion in a discarded robot.

www.imdb.com

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But people notice things that relate to there own specialisms. I often wonder, "how many more things do I not notice because I don't know about that stuff?" I mean there is an awful lot more stuff I don't know about than I do.

There'll always be a bit of that, but I think a lot of it is just thinking logically about stuff and applying basic principles.

You see this is SF/fantasy books as well, where it's clear they've thought through some stuff but not other bits. There's one popular, almost beloved contemporary SF writer who I just cannot read because they make occasional but severe science errors, usually whilst totally unnecessarily describing the scientific basis of something - like, if they'd just said nothing, it could just be fancy tech, but they explain it, and it's like "NO". The most frustrating example with their work was needlessly explaining a device which supposedly worked as a long-term power supply under certain circumstances, and it was just a straight-up perpetual motion machine. You could see why they might not get that because they seemed to be thinking it was analogous to a motion-powered watch, but they clearly didn't understand the frame of reference, and more importantly, had forgotten about basic thermodynamics. There was also an alien race who were supposed to be super-stealthy but had no sense of hearing (so no ability to accurately gauge how much noise they were making, vibration sense alone won't cut it) and literally had bright flashing lights on their heads. Sigh.

That was, I admit, nowhere near as egregious as another book I read the same year, which was all about an engine which allowed a craft to reach a significant fraction of the speed of light (like 0.2c), and how this could be used as a weapon, and the whole book seemed to illustrate at least a basic understanding of relativity, the speed of light, etc. then suddenly at the end, the author seems to forget all that, and the engine powers up and instantly destroys a bunch of stuff like half a solar-system away from it. And the description is really clear. The same author literally had messages being time-delayed by distance and so on earlier in the book, yet this drive (which doesn't emit tachyons or anything, it's just a powerful engine) blows up all this stuff halfway across the solar system, and the person in the ship witnesses it in real time (i.e. drive fires, they immediately see stuff being blown up). It's like the author thought the drive exhaust was superluminal - despite it clearly not being from earlier descriptions - but even that doesn't explain how the person on the ship would witness it. Almost feels like they had a science advisor who gave up at the end of the book or something. Bizarre.

That's just basic physics stuff from school though.

Training-wise there is one thing that regularly gets me in SF, and sometimes even in non-SF, and that's carbon dating. If anyone reading this is ever going to write about carbon dating, please know two things:

1) IT ONLY WORKS ON EARTH. Not on any other planets. Yeah not even ones in the solar system.

2) It only goes back accurately-ish for about 50,000 years.

You could develop a carbon-dating system for another planet, maybe, but only if it had a carbon-based biosphere, and you put in a huge amount of effort working out the profile of carbon-14 in that biosphere (we have to basically calibrate by tree rings and stuff).

Most other dating methods also won't work. In general it is severely non-trivial to date things. And you see some fairly respected SF authors casually having people carbon-date stuff on like, Mars, or an alien world they've just arrived on an it's like "argh no". Why not just make up something, like a "The age-analysis systems suggest X is 500,000 years old!". We don't know how your age-analysis systems work, maybe that's viable (I mean probably not but I can't prove it!).

Back on RPGs there's nothing worse than a trap which either:

A) Obviously wouldn't work because of basic physics or other principles (we saw one discussed at some length a while back here).

or

B) Wouldn't be viable in the context of the rest of the dungeon (i.e. hobgoblins patrol through here every two hours, but the trap has no arm/disarm mechanism and a massive trigger - usually this is just the result of someone thinking a trap was "cool" and failing to consider how it would actually work).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You see this is SF/fantasy books as well, where it's clear they've thought through some stuff but not other bits

In space, no one can hear you sh...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

1) IT ONLY WORKS ON EARTH.

Even then, it means making assumptions about past atmospheric composition.

And 3) it only works for things that where once living carbon based life forms.

You can gain get dating information from the ratio of uranium isotopes though. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/uranium-series-dating

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But the discussion of trolls as an example assumes real world genetics. If they replicate by asexual reproduction then as long as there's one and enough food their population can always recover.

I also don't assume they could be domesticated to any degree (although that could be a cool aspect of a setting). We may have gorillas in zoos, but we haven't figured out how to make them slaves yet.

Food supply is a bigger issue which I've always had a problem with for various settings. I have my own workarounds and other thoughts on this, but it's off topic.

And many bison simply cannot be domesticated.

But it’s funny. People will also talk about humans eradicating things as if there weren’t at least a thousand years or more where Europeans had cultures and metal weaponry and the aurochs still roamed Europe, before they were hunted to extinction.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Even then, it means making assumptions about past atmospheric composition.

And 3) it only works for things that where once living carbon based life forms.

You can gain get dating information from the ratio of uranium isotopes though. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/uranium-series-dating

Re: living you can often get away with dating material that's around an object, so like, not quite but yeah, you can only date things which were once alive. And oh god yes re: assumptions. Assumptions that's we've made a lot more scientific and precise over time (and were not that far off to start with, thankfully), but yeah, assumptions nonetheless. Uranium-thorium dating works back to like 500k, but yes covers more than carbon dating, albeit less precisely. Potassium-Argon dating usually only works on rocks more than 100k years old but has been used on Mars, and I think goes back 4.5bn years, so there's that (not sure if it would work in other solar systems but I imagine I could work it out with a bit of reading). Luminescence dating may also work on Mars but definitely needs to be calibrated for Mars (whereas Potassium-Argon I think works as well as on Earth, though perhaps a geologist can correct me). At least most SF gets the concept of stratigraphy, I guess that's fairly well-taught in school.

 

[MNblockhead]

I love how a threat on first footage of a movie has evolved into a discussions of historically accurate placement of loos.

Reminds me I'm hanging out in the right place.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I downloaded an app that allows me to see the likes to dislikes ratio fothis trailer.

8,964 dislikes
125,255 likes
Ratio 4.7/5 stars
Views 17,090,420