There’s a new Dungeon & Dragons movie currently in the works, and the producer says it’s going to take inspiration from two seemingly disparate sources.
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“This new Dungeons & Dragons will be a Guardians of the Galaxy-tone movie in a Tolkien-like universe,” Roy Lee told Collider at the DICE 2016 games industry summit. “Because when you think of all the Hobbit movies and The Lord of the Rings, they have an earnestness to them, and to see something fun, a Raiders romp inside that world, I feel is something the audience has not seen before.”
David Leslie Johnson (Orphan) wrote the script for the new film, and Lee says he believes Warner Bros. may be interested in moving forward with the project.
“I think it will really be moving forward quickly, and I don’t anticipate it not getting greenlit this year, mostly because Warner Bros. has DC now, and LEGO, and the Harry Potter universe that’s being cultivated as their franchises,” Lee explained. “I believe they see Dungeons & Dragons as something that could be cultivated as a multi-universe movie where there will be spinoffs from the first movie being in Forgotten Realms and subsequent movies being in different worlds.”
For the uninitiated, Forgotten Realms is what D&D players refer to as a “campaign setting,” a world in the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse in which a player group’s adventures can take place. Forgotten Realms is the most popular of these worlds, with most of its stories taking place on the Middle-earth like continent of Faerรปn, but others include the steampunk inspired world of Eberron and the dystopian, post-apocalyptic desert world of Dark Sun.
As someone who has played Dungeons & Dragons a fair bit, I think the Guardians of the Galaxy meets Lord of the Rings approach is a solid one, and one that has been achieved in Dungeons & Dragons fiction prior in the form of John Rogers and Andrea Di Vito’s unfortunately short-lived IDW Publishing comic book series.
