What Do You Think Of This?

[geneweigel]

deadline.com/2016/06/ansel-elgort-dungeons-and-dragons-movie-1201778139/

I'm actually feeling a little positive.

[foster1941]

There's more than enough raw material to make a decent D&D-based movie, and it would be fun to see iconic D&D monsters, spells, and magic items depicted with a big Hollywood visual effects budget - to see an acid-spitting black dragon and regenerating trolls and wererats and displacer beasts and somebody casting web and Evard's black tentacles and conjuring an elemental and drinking a potion of gaseous form and using a wand of polymorphing and plane-shifting to the Astral Plane or the City of Brass and all kinds of other stuff like that. The plot can be a simple macguffin hunt that just gives an excuse to show off as much of the cool-looking IP as possible.

I assume they won't actually pull it off, though, and the result will be either too ironic and self-aware and full of "geek humor" or too heavily invested in the aesthetics and IP of "new D&D" (with the dragon-people and demon-people and steampunk stuff and cartoonishly oversized weapons and armor and all that stuff that makes me look at the books and not even recognize it as the same thing I played in the 80s), or, most likely, both.

[geneweigel]

It definitely needs to be as geek-wary as the comic book stuff we've been seeing lately (exception maybe XMEN and TURTLES)

I think if its a Warner Brothers picture there is a good chance that they'll try to wade past the Forgotten Realms shitstorm and at least get back to the best selling toy and TV show era.

[GRWelsh]

The problem with making a D&D movie is that there is no D&D story, not really. So, any script writer has to invent something whole cloth, and that makes it a real hit or miss affair. Just like you can love the D&D game but hate a particular DM's campaign.

The closest thing to "a core D&D story" is more conducive to playing a game than to fiction: a group of adventurers meet in a tavern/keep/base area to plan an expedition to some remote or abandoned dungeon/cave/tomb/lost city in search of treasure. But I would like to see a script writer try to make something out of that, or a core D&D theme we're all familiar with. Take it back to a pulp sensibility, maybe.

Not every fantasy movie has to be an epic with heroes saving the world. Maybe one could just be about a couple of selfish guys trying to get treasure and survive!

[geneweigel]

Make a saving throw vs death to see if the ring gets thrown into the volcano...

You know I always had a problem with the bland game representation of hobbits. I think this applies here but in reverse in to making a D&D movie.

That is where you would need to research character story relatability to EXPAND game features to make hobbits work more appealingly in a game but for a D&D movie you would need to research things as the game features are and get the most SUCCINCT version to make it relatable.

No jazz (Emmerich Godzilla laying eggs, Jackson Kong being a standard gorilla superimposed, VAN HELSING Frankenstein being a cyborg, Hobbits superimposed scale, etc.), no combinations (Bruce Banner's father merged with Crusher Creel and Zzzax, Mary Jane and Gwen Stacy, Legolas and Glorfindel, etc.) or no intangible projections (beholder with no eye functions as a brute guard, every post JURASSIC PARK monster movie with CG that doesn't build interactive actual-sized props, etc.)

[foster1941]

Not having a pre-existing core story and characters could be a good thing, because it gives the writers more freedom and, since WB seems to intend D&D to become a tent-pole franchise, allows for a greater variety of movies with the shared setting and branding but different characters and stories. You can have (at least theoretically) quasi-horror, quasi-mystery, quasi-romance, quasi-war movie, quasi-epic, etc., all under the same brand umbrella, sharing the same "setting bible" and production design and visual effects templates. It would be great if they made four D&D movies each with a different story and style - say one about a group of adventurers looking for treasure, one a fantasy-horror mystery, one a coming-of-age story about a young wizard, and one an epic war movie - but all sharing the same setting, so the rules of magic work the same way, the monsters (dragons, trolls, demons, etc.) look the same, common locations and historical figures are mentioned, etc. Leave it to the individual writers for each movie to come up with compelling characters and stories to place on top of that common setting.

[geneweigel]

Isn't that what they did with 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (2016)? I've seen both movies but I still don't understand how it relates to CLOVERFIELD (2008) except that some sci-fi shit is going on in the background.