Can the latest Dungeons & Dragons movie starring Chris Pine break Hollywood jinx on video and board game adaptations, as HBO’s The Last of Us did?
- Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is the latest adaptation of the game, and producers hope it will fare better than previous film versions
- Dungeons & Dragons is seeing a resurgence and many in the entertainment industry are fans of the original role-playing game
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves begins with Chris Pine’s character begging for a second chance. A lute-playing bard condemned to a prison in the tundra for “grand larceny and skulduggery”, he stands before a clemency council, promising his jailers he’s reformed.
It might as well be a plea from the D&D franchise itself, which has a legacy of screen adaptations as chequered as the protagonist’s past.
The last high-profile stab at turning the popular tabletop role-playing game into a feature film, 2000’s New Line Cinema production Dungeons & Dragons, was savaged by critics and bombed at the box office. Two maligned sequels followed. Before that came a short-lived animated kids’ show in the 1980s.
Honor Among Thieves is looking to break the franchise’s curse.
“Nobody had done [D&D] justice yet,” writer-director Jonathan Goldstein said at the SXSW (South by Southwest) premiere. “Now justice has been done.”