Few brands with global name recognition have had more trouble getting a media franchise off the ground than Dungeons & Dragons. The tabletop gaming mainstay—owned by Hasbro through its Wizards Of The Coast subsidiary—has dominated gaming spaces for decades, but its various film and TV projects have run the gamut from outright embarrassing, to nostalgia bait, to genuinely pretty good (but still kind of a flop). Now, Hasbro is teaming up with Netflix and Deadpool & Wolverine director Shawn Levy to take its latest stab at adapting D&D for TV, with Deadline reporting that a live-action series set in the company’s Forgotten Realms setting is now in the works.
The series is being written and showrun by Drew Crevello, who you might know from WeCrashed—or from his previous failed efforts to get a D&D show made at Paramount+. (Developed around the same time as 2023 Paramount adaptation Honor Among Thieves, the series was also developed by Red Notice‘s Rawson Marshall Thurber, and was shuffled off the table not long after the film slumped its way in and out of theaters.) Levy, who also worked on Netflix’s D&D-loving golden goose Stranger Things, will produce, while Crevello handles the creative side of things.
Created in 1967 by Ed Greenwood, the Forgotten Realms setting is by far the most popular and well-used of D&D‘s pre-built universes, largely owing to its sheer breadth, which allows more esoteric concepts, gods, and magical ideas to exist alongside fairly stock fantasy archetypes. It’s been the setting for dozens of video games, even more books, and even the aforementioned 2023 film, giving Crevello and his writers lots of potential material to pull from as they try to build a viable D&D entertainment offering. The new show isn’t the only WotC project currently in development, either; Netflix is apparently still also working on an adaptation of card game Magic: The Gathering, separate from the film version that was just announced last week.
