Bringing the Adventure Back to the Screen
Dungeons and Dragons has had a tricky history with adaptations. The Baldur’s Gate series has been successful. The eighties cartoon, commissioned during a time where everything from the Harlem Globetrotters to Alien had a cartoon planned, was cancelled unceremoniously before the characters got back home. The live-action movie was critically reviled and bombed at the box office. However, the game is still as popular as ever, and with so many other tabletop games getting big budget adaptations in one medium or another, as well as the renewed interest caused by popular shows like Community or Stranger Things, Hasbro are eager to take Dungeons and Dragons to the next level.
During a quarterly earnings call, CEO Brian Goldner had this to say:
[The entertainment division is] also working on a couple of different approaches, because there is so much mythology in canon to [adapt] Dungeons & Dragons for live-action television. And there’s been very strong interest. We’ve talked about how many global streamers and terrestrial broadcasters have been very interested in Dungeons & Dragons.
It’s interesting that he mentions the sheer level of canon and mythology there is to adapt. Dungeons and Dragons famously lets the dungeon master plot out an adventure for the players to follow, making their own choices as they do so, but there’s still a lot of gamebooks to inspire them. Will the series follow one consistent storyline, or will it instead take inspiration from anthology shows like Black Mirror or American Horror Story, with every episode or season telling a distinct story. If my own experiences with tabletop RPG’s are anything to go by a single encounter can easily take hours to play through (I never said I was good).
Will you be checking out Dungeons and Dragons? Let us know down in the comments.