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Dungeons And Dragons Movie Remakes

It has a clear roster of classes, including odders ones like Bard, Druid, or Paladin, when a lot of fantasy has implicit classes defaulting to the quartet of Fighter-Wizard-Rogue-Cleric, if that.

It has some iconic monster manual creatures like the Gelatinous Cube, Mimic, Displacer Beast, and Owlbear, which get some screentime in modern MCU quality SFX.

It also might even have some worldbuilding elements from D&D too.

That seems like enough. The Legend of Vox Machina was literally an adaptation of a D&D session podcast, and it worked fine.
 
firefossil said:
It has a clear roster of classes, including odders ones like Bard, Druid, or Paladin, when a lot of fantasy has implicit classes defaulting to the quartet of Fighter-Wizard-Rogue-Cleric, if that.

It has some iconic monster manual creatures like the Gelatinous Cube, Mimic, Displacer Beast, and Owlbear, which get some screentime in modern MCU quality SFX.

It also might even have some worldbuilding elements from D&D too.

That seems like enough. The Legend of Vox Machina was literally an adaptation of a D&D session podcast, and it worked fine.
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Forgotten Realms specific actually. Mentions that the protag's a harper, villain rules Neverwinter and is in league with the Red Wizards, and someone's mentioned that the gold pieces in one bit appear to be the square ones from Waterdeep.
 
According to a Variety article, this thing cost $151 million. I'm not sure if that's including marketing costs, but with a price tag like that, I suspect it's already doomed.
 
I mean it's one if the most popular IPs in the world, when Wizards isn't in a murder suicide pact with it.

It's not that much of a budget to make back
 
Studios don't make movies like this to make their money back, they make them to turn profits. I mean like consider the difference between setting aside $150M for a movie and setting it aside for the stock market or real estate or whatever else. In the ideal world for Hollywood, they do stuff like this because the return on investment is larger and faster than putting their money somewhere else. When you consider it in terms of turning money into more money then Hollywood's sometimes wacky seeming break-even points start to make more sense. You're not going from zero to fifty million, you're going from two hundred million to two hundred and fifty million.

And these studios are greedy after the runaway success of projects like the MCU. When they set out to 'build franchises' there's a lot of legwork that has to be done that might not end up 'counted' in the budget. There's meant to be a D&D TV show off the back of this movie that's already in production, loads of tie in media and merch, etc. If the movie bombs hard it doesn't just take itself down but all of this work might go up in smoke with it.

So if it 'only' makes back $150M then (putting aside tax exploits) that's basically stagnant money, if not even lost money due to inflation and such like. Then on top of that you have the marketing budgets which are 'traditionally' counted as double for big budget movies like this and it's probably fairly likely that it has to make over (perhaps even well over) $300M just to be seen as barely profitable which basically means it has no future. Black Adam was largely considered to be a financial failure at $393M.



List of biggest box-office bombs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia's list of box office bombs.

You can see that for production budgets that look similar a gross of even $300M isn't really enough. Looking at some other movies on the list it kinda looks like for fantasy-esque movies in this space the breakeven point is at minimum close to $250M and routinely much higher.

So all up my guess would be that it would probably have to be making like $4-500M to actually meet their expectations.
 
Part of me thinks this movie is coming out just a few years too late? I kinda feel like popular culture is turning against its big embrace of nerd stuff (Superheroes and super hero movies most prominently but also like D&D, anime funko pops, classic nerd movies getting remakes and reboots etc) when I saw the trailer for this my mind could only muster up a "huh that looks kinda neat" and prompty forgot about it until I saw the trailer again months later. Maybe I am just jaded and my personal tastes are shifting from super heroes and wizards to cowboys detectives and historical figures but I do kinda feel a general tiredness in the air.
 
Alex said:
Part of me thinks this movie is coming out just a few years too late? I kinda feel like popular culture is turning against its big embrace of nerd stuff (Superheroes and super hero movies most prominently but also like D&D, anime funko pops, classic nerd movies getting remakes and reboots etc) when I saw the trailer for this my mind could only muster up a "huh that looks kinda neat" and prompty forgot about it until I saw the trailer again months later. Maybe I am just jaded and my personal tastes are shifting from super heroes and wizards to cowboys detectives and historical figures but I do kinda feel a general tiredness in the air.
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Look if Cocaine Bears aren't "nerd stuff", I don't know what they are.
 
That's because there are no nerds anymore. That is, if everyone is a nerd, no one is. It's just mainstream popular culture.

And now a lot of what was popular in the tens people are getting sick of, and it's time to move on.
 
I'm sure the movie'a gonna be perfectly fine (trailers have a lot of "Well that happened!" energy but I love Chris Pine so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), but it truly boggles my mind that they didn't use the obvious (at least to me) plot hook of having the movie be a dramatization of some kids actually playing D&D (Princess Bride-style).
 
Arthur Frayn said:
but it truly boggles my mind that they didn't use the obvious (at least to me) plot hook of having the movie be a dramatization of some kids actually playing D&D (Princess Bride-style).
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To quote a Variety article:
They briefly entertained the idea that the film could be about people playing the game, but quickly ruled it out, especially after the release of 2019's "Jumanji: The Next Level," in which regular people become embodied as avatars within a video game.

"The moment 'Jumanji' came out, we said, 'No, we can't do this again,'" [John Francis] Daley says. "Also, it does a little bit of a disservice. It reduces D&D to just a game and I think that there is so much that can be explored within that world. And it's hard, stakes-wise, to care about a character that you know as an audience is being played by someone who's safely in their home."

Instead, the directors let the action of the story be informed by the open-ended nature of how players approach the game, in which a party of fantasy archetypes try to figure their way through an elaborate campaign.
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John Wick 4 gets kicked off the top spot after a single week. What the heck happened?
www.hollywoodreporter.com

Box Office: ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Opens to OK $38.5M in North America

The big-budget event pic, based on Hasbro's classic roleplaying game, will need long legs to launch a new movie franchise for Paramount and eOne.
www.hollywoodreporter.com www.hollywoodreporter.com
Buoyed by positive reviews and enthusiastic word-of-mouth, Paramount and eOne's adaptation of the popular role-playing game landed on the higher end of expectations of $30 million to $40 million.

Internationally, Dungeons & Dragons collected $33 million from 58 markets for a global tally of $71.5 million.

... Audiences awarded the film an "A-" CinemaScore, which is a good sign even though it'll soon face competition from Super Mario Bros, which opens next weekend.
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It was a fun romp and I laughed the hardest at moments where I imagined some gamers at a table coming up with them and an exasperated/sarcastic DM guiding them through.
Though their depictions of halflings and tieflings were really bad and broke some immersion to me lol.
 
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Great fun; the combination of costuming and non-weapons grade CGI added so much charm.
There were a bunch of little gaming in jokes that ranged from very obvious (the DMPC) to more subtle (the Druid missed a session which is why her character is kind of present but not there for the Underdark) that I loved.
I went in if anything expecting meh as I wanted Ocean's D20 but was very pleasantly surprised and if Mario doesn't steal all the thunder could see this having legs.
 
Mutton said:
Great fun; the combination of costuming and non-weapons grade CGI added so much charm.
There were a bunch of little gaming in jokes that ranged from very obvious (the DMPC) to more subtle (the Druid missed a session which is why her character is kind of present but not there for the Underdark) that I loved.
I went in if anything expecting meh as I wanted Ocean's D20 but was very pleasantly surprised and if Mario doesn't steal all the thunder could see this having legs.
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one of my favorite moments is how after triggering the puzzle trap immediately the DM probably goes "Simon, your character notices that Olga's staff is actually a teleportation staff!" because they have no idea how else to progress the plot after the players ruined their 'perfectly designed puzzle'
 
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Gog said:
one of my favorite moments is how after triggering the puzzle trap immediately the DM probably goes "Simon, your character notices that Olga's staff is actually a teleportation staff!" because they have no idea how else to progress the plot after the players ruined their 'perfectly designed puzzle'
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I could hear the sigh from behind the screen and the mad scramble for "uh, um, fuck it roll Detect Magic"
 
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