A live-action series based on the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons is coming to Paramount+. The pilot of the show was written and directed by Rawson Marshall Thurber, who wrote films like “Dodgeball” and “Red Notice.”
“The D&D strategy is a broad four-quadrant strategy, where we have this powerful brand that has similar awareness, say like ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Harry Potter,’” said Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks on the same call. “And we’re going to imbue it with blockbuster entertainment, like we have with the movie coming up.”
A potential problem with this plan, though, is that Dungeons & Dragons is a framework through which people create their own fantasy-inspired stories and games — there isn’t really a core canon or plot that unifies the interest of all players of the game. You could surmise that most “Harry Potter” fans feel an emotional attachment to the story of the orphaned boy wizard and his friends, but you can’t really have a favorite character or scene in Dungeons & Dragons. For the most part, every group’s game has different fan-made characters and events. While Wizards of the Coast does publish some books with “official” lore and ideas, they’re not essential to gameplay.
Paramount+ orders a live-action ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ series by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch
