With Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves in theaters and Crucial Position’s animated collection The Legend of Vox Machina recent off its second season, it appears like D&D onscreen is having a very mainstream second. Is that this simply the beginning of a much bigger D&D display franchise? Is Honor Amongst Thieves headed for a sequel, a film collection, or a bunch of spinoffs? Polygon requested writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein what type they’d wish to see future D&D tales take.
“I feel stop-motion,” Daley says, with out hesitation. “Rankin/Bass type, a complete throwback.”
Daley means it as a joke. However it isn’t the worst thought, given stop-motion animation’s latest micro-boom: A brand new Netflix film from Nightmare Earlier than Christmas director Henry Selick and Guillermo del Toro’s extraordinarily darkish, Oscar-nominated tackle Pinocchio each arrived late final yr, and 2023 will see a brand new Hen Run sequel and two new Wes Anderson movies that can reportedly embrace stop-motion. Any type of animation may be a very good strategy for Dungeons & Dragons’ wealthy fantasy worlds. However Daley and Goldstein aren’t really enthusiastic about subsequent steps fairly but.
Will Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves get a sequel?
“It was by no means our intention once we got here on board this movie to make a franchise,” Daley says. “I feel that may cloud our skill to focus totally on the movie at hand. The cardinal mistake many studios make is to place the cart earlier than the horse, the place they begin crafting a cinematic universe earlier than they even make a very good single movie. So at the start for us was getting this proper.”
That’s a refreshing perspective in a world the place studios hold forgetting to begin small and construct a fandom organically, as a substitute of making an attempt to kickstart a 10-year mega-blockbuster plan with each new film. That stated, with Honor Amongst Thieves out, in fact the administrators are enthusiastic about the place they’d wish to see these characters go subsequent.
Goldstein says if that they had carte blanche to do something with the D&D world, they’d most likely keep on with the celebration they set up in Honor Amongst Thieves: Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, and Sophia Lillis as an adventuring crew who forge some private connections over the course of the story.
“The advantage of a sequel is, you don’t should spend a lot display time introducing [the party],” he says. “The viewers is aware of them, and you may leap into the plot extra rapidly. And clearly, now we have nice affection for each the actors and these roles that they play. However we’d need to introduce some new figures alongside the best way, and positively a whole lot of new monsters.”
“And new places,” Daley provides.
“Yeah, you already know, we did the Forgotten Realms for this one, partly as a result of it’s form of a recognizable medieval setting,” Goldstein says. “However there are such a lot of worlds inside D&D that we may discover.”
“Now that we’ve completed it, and we’re counting on the fates to resolve if this factor is a hit, we might completely like to proceed to inform tales on this world,” Daley says. “We expect it’s completely ripe with potential.”
What would Honor Amongst Thieves 2 seem like?
A part of that potential, Daley says, is a core aspect of Dungeons & Dragons that doesn’t come up of their film: “I feel if we had been fortunate sufficient to do one other one in all these, we might need to see our characters degree up.” In Honor Amongst Thieves, Pine’s bard character Edgin by no means makes use of magic (for causes the administrators defined to us for our bigger have a look at the film’s decisions), however Daley thinks in a sequel, he’d most likely add spells to his repertoire. “That will be form of thrilling to see,” he says.
Goldstein says that when the 2 males had been planning the film — which lists them as co-writers alongside collaborator Michael Gilio, with a narrative by Gilio and Chris McKay — they requested Wizards of the Coast for “an inventory of the 30 largest fan-favorite creatures” to present them concepts. “After which we had the liberty to pick out what we should always characteristic.”
That explains Honor Amongst Thieves’ use of an owlbear, a displacer beast, and a mimic, amongst different creatures from previous D&D lore. However it leaves them with a lot to cowl in future tales.
When is Drizzt getting a D&D film?
After which there’s one in all fandom’s largest questions on Dungeons & Dragons display tales: When is fan-favorite character Drizzt Do’urden getting his personal film or TV present? Might he flip up in an Honor Amongst Thieves sequel or spinoff?
“Drizzt did come up, really, as we had been determining what our first movie was going to be,” Daley says. “However the common consensus was to not go there but. That stated, he’s positively a preferred character on this planet, and one who could possibly be thrilling to discover.”
“How a few film the place Drizzt meets the ’80s characters?” Goldstein asks, referring to the Saturday morning cartoon characters from the Nineteen Eighties, who characteristic in a maze sequence in one in all Honor Amongst Thieves’ geekiest references.
“And the ’80s characters are horribly maimed after their expertise within the maze?” Daley laughs.
That appears even much less possible than a stop-motion D&D film. However for Daley, this sort of imaginative toying with the probabilities of WOTC properties is a part of the enjoyable of a D&D story. “There are such a lot of characters on this world,” he says. “It could be actually enjoyable both to have them be part of the group we’ve established, or do some type of an offshoot of our movie, to get into their backstories.”