We’ll say this about Hasbro’s decades-spanning efforts to get some serious Hollywood money out of the internationally famous Dungeons & Dragons brand it’s owned since 1999: They don’t give up easy. Earlier this week, we reported on an apparent pivot in the company’s TV plans for the franchise—dumping a planned series set in the more traditional Forgotten Realms campaign setting for one in the far spookier Ravenloft—that suggested Hasbro’s just going to keep trying stuff until something works. Now, the directors of 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves are out here making the rounds, suggesting plans for a sequel aren’t quite as dire as they initially seemed.
The story of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Honor Among Thieves is pretty well-documented at this point, as critical and fan enthusiasm for the adventurous comedy failed to overcome box office ennui (and whatever curse keeps shoving Chris Pine’s film franchises into a drawer to rot), causing Paramount to turn up its nose at a completed script for a sequel. But, per a recent interview with The Playlist—timed to their new (and not especially good) Ryan Reynolds/Kenneth Branagh comedy Mayday—hope for Goldstein and Daley to get the gang back around the table springs eternal in The House That My Little Pony Built.
“I think Hasbro is a big believer in it,” Goldstein said on the podcast, adding that the company has been making a serious effort to shop the script around to another major studio. (Honor Among Thieves reportedly cost $150 million to make, so you’re not making this thing on A24 money.) Daley—who spoke of being “proud of the script” for the unproduced film—also reflected a bit on why the first movie underperformed at the box office, making a lousy-for-its-budget $200 million. “It was very much a product of not-so-great timing when the first movie came out. It came out four days before the Super Mario movie, which broke records. It came out a month after Wizards Of The Coast changed the official gaming license, prompting many D&D fans to boycott the game, and I don’t think the marketing did enough to tell people who weren’t already fans that this movie might be for them. Yeah, so it was a perfect storm of all of those elements, and we’ll see.”
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