Making a movie out of a game that is meant to be built by the unique players who enjoy it is quite an uphill battle. After enough time to forget the previous cinematic endeavors, a complete cultural shift in perception and a series of hostile negotiations, D&D is ready to take his chance again.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was unveiled at this year’s Comic-Con, where it teased its sense of humor and fantasy action style. Some thought it was a nice proof of concept, while others see a huge problem with both the premise and execution.
Looking back on the D&D past adaptations, they are plagued with problems too numerous to mention. On the other hand, customizations of individual campaigns have had tremendous success, both in terms of financial return and fan reception. Making a feature film from the concept of D&D will run into the same problem every time. There is no central story that Honor among thieves intends to adapt, it just takes place in the world of Forgotten Realms. The cast of characters feels vaguely like adventurous company you might see around a table, but just like the lowest common denominator of D&D groups, it all feels strongly based on other movies. The likely outcome of a D&D movie will always be a generic fantasy movie with a lot of references. The studio hopes to send fans home happy after seeing a mimic or gelatinous cube, everything else is secondary. The only major difference between Honor among thieves and any other fantasy story is the license that allows them to use fan favorite designs. With that in mind, how can the film overcome its default status?
A film cannot and should not feel improvised by nature. This is a huge wound in the premise of making a movie of a collaborative story game like D&D, which shines in the moments of chaotic freedom that improvisation can offer. Adapting a video game to the screen was no small task, resulting in far more failures than successes, but at least a video game is the same basic experience for every player. The pleasure of D&D is the fact that it can be whatever the group wants it to be. One way to sell the experience through cinema, attracting the knowing smiles of hardcore fans and enticing newcomers would be to create an anarchic story where anything seems possible.
From the short clips that fans have seen from Honor among thieves, it seems to be one of the endless generic adventures that take place in the setting of Forgotten Realms. The kind of story that would normally appear in an RA Salvatore novel, of which there are a lot of them. Those books have their audiences, but in the gradual shift in popularity that tabletop gaming has enjoyed over the past few decades, they’ve fallen out of favor. This may be a deliberate deception, but it seems like the most obvious direction to take this kind of movie. Hasbro is licensing the film to Paramount, they want a trailer for their extremely specific fantasy setting in the hopes that fans will outsource all their creativity to the books for sale. This will rule in the kind of creativity the filmmakers can wield, but it doesn’t have to kill the project.
Honor among thieves should take a page from one of the best movies ever made from a global media brand, The Lego movie. That movie spends most of its running time showing the many unique worlds you could theoretically build with Lego branded products, but towards the end it takes a turn. The real-life story that appears as a huge twist and massively informs the plot is one of the film’s most inspired picks. Honor among thieves was able to pull similar playful tricks throughout the feature. The film could portray the actual table experience, portraying both the fictional players and their fictional characters. This allows the film to do something the previous works never did, explore the audience’s relationship with D&D, and explore why fans fell in love with it.
Works as The Legend of Vox Machina or Harmonquest capture what fans like to experience around their own table. They pull this off by hiring professionals to portray a real game and examine everything from sloppy voice controls to chaotic combat from the characters’ perspective. Honor among thieves isn’t based on a much-loved campaign played by people who are 100% committed to their characters, as those are actual adaptations, but it might try to fake it. Sticking to the typical rails of another fantasy story leaves the audience with a weaker Guardians of the Universe with a handful of soulless cameos. This shouldn’t come across as a fan movie. Placing a displacer beast won’t make it. Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves must use the power of the game to make something worthwhile, or risk ending up without inspiration.
0 Comments