The beloved tabletop RPG is coming (back) to the big screen with Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
Paramount Pictures delighted D&D fans at Comic-Con with a panel and official trailer for their upcoming feature, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
The film is a reboot of the film trilogy that was launched with Dungeons & Dragons (2000). That film bombed at the box office, earning just over $33 million worldwide against its $45 million budget. It was also savaged by critics for its poor quality (especially cheap special effects), subpar performances, and inept direction. That film still spawned D&D: Wrath of the Dragon God (2005), an independent made-for-TV sequel; and D&D 3: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012), which had a direct-to-DVD release.
The current reboot was first proposed by Warner Bros. in 2013, but the announcement of the project quickly drew the ire of Hasbro, because Hasbro was developing its own D&D movie with Universal Pictures. Hasbro sued and eventually settled, giving Warner Bros. the green light. Hasbro eventually moved the project to Paramount, shooting for a July 2021 release, and hired John Francis Daley and Jonathon Goldstein to write and direct. The release was delayed twice, but Honor Among Thieves will finally see the light of day on March 3, 2023.
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Chris Pine plays Elgin, a bard.
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He and his band of thieves stole the wrong artifact and unleashed a great evil on the world.
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To fix things, Elgin needs the strength of Holga, a barbarian (Michelle Rodriguez).
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He will need the courage of Xenk, a paladin (Rege-Jean Page). Check out the fake chiseled abs on his armor.
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He will need the magic of Simon, a wizard (Justice Smith).
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And he’ll need Doric, a tiefling druid because…
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… Doric can be transformed into an owl bone.
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Readers of a certain age might recognize Francis Daley’s name: as an actor, he played Sam Weir on the tragically underrated 1999-2000 TV show Freaks and Geeks. (He also played FBI profiler Lance Sweets on Bones.) He discovered D&D during his time on the show, and it goes without saying that it’s a dream come true for him to direct a D&D movie. As he told the crowd in Hall H at Comic-Con:
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my character [on Freaks and Geeks] he was a geek and a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons. I knew it peripherally, so I decided, being the young method actor that I was, to campaign with the cast mates and immediately fell in love with the world.
Because, as you know, anyone who plays Dungeons and Dragons, it’s not just a game. It’s really the feeling you get when you play and that’s what we tried to do here with this movie. That feeling of camaraderie, family, coming together as a group, facing obstacles [where] you don’t know what to expect. So many things that, much to the chagrin of the DM [dungeon master], he doesn’t know what will happen. So that’s what we wanted to capture. And of course, that unique brand of humor that I think sets us apart from anything else in the fantasy space.
Honor Among Thieves is set in the popular Forgotten Realms campaign. The film’s official premise is short and sweet: “A charming thief and a band of unlikely adventurers embark on an epic heist to recover a lost relic, but things go dangerously wrong when they run into the wrong people.”
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Hugh Grant plays a scoundrel named Forge Fletcher.
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There are dragons. Of couse.
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Also flaming swords.
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And the spell
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A jelly cube comes in handy in a pinch.
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Bonus: Chris Pine playing the lute.
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That charming thief is Elgin, a bard, played by Chris Pine, who admits in the trailer that as a thief, you’re bound to make a few enemies, and sometimes those enemies decide to get revenge. “The truth is, we helped the wrong person steal the wrong thing,” he says in a voiceover. “We didn’t mean to unleash the greatest evil the world has ever known, but we’re going to fix it.”
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