I concur with the idea that WOTC needs to follow Marvel's lead in transitioning properties from its home media business (for D&D, that's the TRPG medium) to another media arena; that Hasbro already has something like this operational is a good sign for the business, and I would think that it would be good for the D&D brand (as well as the subordinate brands that are its vassals, such as the Realms) to work through such internal agencies. This is, from the perspective of the long-term health of D&D, not a bad thing.
Where I disagree is in specifics. Any movie made must be either a summer blockbuster or Oscar bait, primarily due to the monetary costs involved in making such a movie at all, and making a commercially-successful major blockbuster requires attractive talent that has the skill to pull it off before as well as behind the camera. That isn't cheap; this will force decisions on what to translate to film as well as how that gets done, because the pressure will be to focus on spectacle--something that film, as a medium, excells at doing--at the expense of the often-intangible characterization and narrative execution required to make a Dumb Blockbuster into a long-running classic film (with guaranteed revenue over generations) with high repeat-viewing potential.
A television series, on the other hand, lends itself far better to those two intangibles due to the relaxed pressure for spectacle. Serial television demands strong degrees of both characterization and narrative execution for commercial success, especially if the serial is a genre fiction work; the recently-concluded SFC version of Battlestar Galatica, for all its faults, is a very good example of Doing It Right (just as Babylon 5 was in the 1990s, for all of its faults).
The corpus of D&D-brand fiction needs to be divided along subgenre lines when figuring out what property to translate into which other medium. Where the fantasy merges with investigation, noir, some form of intrigue as a driving plot or subplot of the story then shunt it towards TV; where the story is focused on exploration, action scenes, high adventure, or other forms of spectacle that are far better done in a visual medium then shunt towards film. (Paragraphs of description become establishing shots, action routines, etc. that take seconds or minutes to unfold on screen instead of taking long minutes or worse in prose, especially as you get into Fat Fantasy territory and thus run into filler.)
The Icewind Dale novels would make very good films. They are strongly visual, possess easy plots to follow, and work best at the fast pace that a blockbuster has to have to be truly excellent. The prequels, on the other hand, would make for an excellent TV series; lots of melodrama, intrigue, double-dealing and other features of successful TV soap operas and costume dramas are present therein. Find the right actor to play the focal character in both sets, with the work ethic necessary (and health coverage to go with it; he'll need it), and you can make Salvatore's iconic drow outcast hero into a big mainstream cultural icon within five years (and thereby shape an entire generation for life to your banner).
