Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3632994" data-attributes="member: 18832">Director/Writer: Lawrence Kasdan, writer of The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi, and writer-director of The Big Chill and Silverado. The man knows how to write a rollicking action-adventure story and how to write and direct an ensemble piece, which is exactly what you need for a true D&D movie. He's still working, but he wouldn't be as expensive as some of the big-name directors being touted in this thread.Storyline: I would definitely adapt Keith Baker's Dreaming Dark novels. Because The City of Towers is set entirely within Sharn (with only occasional flashbacks and dream sequences set elsewhere), you save on production costs and can benefit from a spectacular but relatively inexpensive setting - impossibly-tall stone towers being a lot easier to CGI into the background than expansive outdoor vistas.The City of Towers also features an absolutely classic D&D creature as its villain (the identity of which is kind of a spoiler), which is great from the point of view of making the film uniquely D&D without badly shoehorning it in like they did the beholder in Courtney Solomon's flick.If the film were a success, you can increase the budget and move to much more exotic locations for the second novel, The Shattered Land, which largely takes place in Xen'drik, and the third, The Gates of Night, which largely takes place in Thelanis and Dal Quor.CastDaine: Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Slither), if he doesn't mind growing a stubbly beard and abandoning his normal floppy hairstyle - and reprising the "disillusioned veteran without a country" role. He can play both comedy and drama very well, and has a solid screen presence without looking like a muscleman.Lei: Rose Byrne (Troy, 28 Weeks Later, Sunshine). Beautiful, but not implausibly so; she doesn't come across as delicate or vapid on screen, which is necessary for an adventurer. The only thing you need to do is give her red hair, which is not exactly difficult.Pierce: CGI-over-live-performance, a la Gollum. The thing I would avoid is giving him a voice which is too deep, because it doesn't suit the character to sound like URL from Futurama, Optimus Prime, or Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation. I would hire a professional voice actor such as Billy West, Frank Welker, or Phil Lamarr (all from Futurama, among many others) to create the vocal character, and a professional physical performer for the body (rather than hope for a combination of both like Andy Serkis).Format: Live-action. For one thing, I would love to see a D&D story done properly as an action-adventure piece with a solid cast, and for another . . .I'm not really a fan of animated movies, whether it be traditional Western cartoons, Pixar-style CGI, or anime. There's absolutely no reason why you can't make The City of Towers and its sequels as live-action films, and the story wouldn't work as well animated because you'd lose the true gravitas of several elements (Daine's painful war memories and Daine and Lei's mutual attraction, to name two).There's also absolutely no way an animated version of Sharn could ever look as impressive as a CGI version which has to fit in with live action.Producer: Francis Ford Coppola. He understands "genre" movies, having produced Sleepy Hollow and directed Bram Stoker's Dracula. He understands war stories and the trauma of veteran soldiers, having directed and produced Apocalypse Now and Gardens of Stone. He knows how to adapt a story to the screen, as we see in The Godfather which takes an indifferent novel and cuts it down to the excellent setpieces, so he'd be able to make sure the film gets at the heart of the action.He also, presumably, knows Lawrence Kasdan through George Lucas.Effects house: I don't think you need or want a big name like Industrial Light & Magic or WETA Workshop. WETA has never done an urban setting (the cities in The Lord of the Rings are nothing like Sharn), and while ILM is the best digital effects studio in the world it would cut down on the budget to use someone who's not right at the cutting edge.I would use Zoic Studios - Firefly, Spider-Man 2, Serenity, and Battlestar Galactica. They're exceptionally good - and their CGI shaky-cam would be good fight scenes! - but nowhere near as expensive as ILM.If I could swing it, I'd have Wayne Reynolds submit character designs to use as templates, especially when it comes to the warforged and monsters in the storyline. At the very least, require the studio to use actual Eberron artwork for reference.Studio: TriStar. For one thing, they use a pegasus on their logo. For another, they specialise in "genre" films now, theoretically (The Mask of Zorro, Silent Hill, and its forthcoming sequel are TriStar pictures). For a third, they've got Columbia and Sony Pictures behind them.Budget: $35 million. You don't need as much CGI or as large a cast as Serenity ($39m) but you need better-quality creatures and a more ambitious goal than, say, Slither ($29.5m), to stick with Nathan Fillion's resume.Since The Lord of the Rings, the closest thing to a D&D film has been Eragon which grossed $75m in the U.S. and a total of $249m worldwide. Lacking the fanbase of Christopher Paolini's novel but adding in the recognition of the D&D and Eberron brands, I would project that a good film based on The City of Towers could gross $45m in the US and at least $120m worldwide.A point on the branding: I'm not sure how you would work it out, but I'm thinking that you'd want Dungeons & Dragons to be part of the title but not in an obtrusive way. Think the reverse of the way The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe was heavily promoted as a Narnia film (it's the biggest word on the poster by an enormous amount, for instance).You'd want the D&D logo right there above the title - I'd suggest using the same D&D logo as on the books - but place the marketing emphasis on the title The City of Towers, or even Eberron: The City of Towers. In fact, you don't need the name D&D to be part of the actual title as long as it's always part of the logo and branding.Anyway, there's my idea. PM me, Scott, if you think it'd work! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification