Warner Bros. is ready to roll the dice on another film adaptation of the classic tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, The Fault In Our Stars actor Ansel Elgort is the likely candidate to play the film’s lead.
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Elgort, of course, was on the shortlist to play Han Solo in his forthcoming Star Wars standalone film. Since the success of The Fault in Our Stars, Elgort has been rumored for a number of high-profile projects.
Goosebumps director Rob Letterman is expected to helm Dungeons and Dragons based on a script by Clash of the Titans scribe David Leslie Johnson. It will mark the first big-budget project Letterman has directed without actor Jack Black since 2009’s Monsters vs. Aliens, and only the second feature he’s done without Black, who teamed with him in Goosebumps, Gulliver’s Travels, and Shark Tale. Letterman is also currently developing a sequel to Goosebumps.
Elgort, who also appeared in the Divergent series, will next appear in Billionaire Boys Club alongside Kingsman star Taron Egerton, after which he will head up Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver.
Hasbro’s Brian Goldner and Stephen Davis will produce, along with Courtney Solomon and Allan Zeman of Sweetpea Entertainment. All of those names might be familiar to anybody who followed the legal battle over the movie’s rights. The short version is that Hasbro currently owns the Dungeons and Dragons brand, having purchased Wizards of the Coast, the game’s publisher. Sweetpea, who had long ago licensed the property, then sold their stake in the film rights to Warner Bros. in the ’90s, and at one point Hasbro tried to reacquire them.
Last August, all interested parties came to an undisclosed settlement, after which point Warner Bros. started developing the film. It’s unlikely that Dungeons and Dragons will have any ties to the planned shared cinematic universe that Hasbro hopes to set up among its various film properties.
Warner Bros. made a previous Dungeons & Dragons film in 2000, which was both a critical and box office failure.
