Long before the current and jam-packed slate of upcoming video game adaptations, Warner Bros. hatched plans to transform Dungeons & Dragons, the genre-defining fantasy board game, into a CG-laden feature film.
One legal dispute later and all signs point to Warner finally issuing the go-ahead for production to get underway. But what can we expect when the series finally roars to life? Well, according to Producer Roy Lee, the creative team behind Dungeons & Dragons – toplined by writer David Leslie Johnson – are looking to J.R.R. Tolkien and James Gunn’s space opera Guardians of the Galaxy for inspiration.
Per Collider:
“This new Dungeons & Dragons will be a Guardians of the Galaxy-tone movie in a Tolkien-like universe. Because when you think of all the Hobbit movies and The Lord of the Rings, they have an earnestness to them, and to see something fun, a Raiders romp inside that world, I feel is something the audience has not seen before.”
Moreover, there’s also mention of Tolkien’s seminal Lord of the Rings saga, which is hardly surprising given how the two inhabit the same genre. But make no mistake, Lee firmly believes that Warner Bros. has a new franchise on its hands should the chips fall into place.
“I think it will really be moving forward quickly, and I don’t anticipate it not getting greenlit this year, mostly because Warner Bros. has DC now, and LEGO, and the Harry Potter universe that’s being cultivated as their franchises. I believe they see Dungeons & Dragons as something that could be cultivated as a multi-universe movie where there will be spinoffs from the first movie being in Forgotten Realms and subsequent movies being in different worlds.”
However, as Collider notes, the studio could be hedging its bets with Dungeons & Dragons for the meantime in anticipation of Duncan Jones’ live-action Warcraft movie. Similar in both aesthetic and its reliance on CGI wizardry, the big-budget epic is due to hit theaters at the beginning of June, and could be a harbinger of things to come for Warner’s D&D feature – for better or worse.