The Dungeons & Dragons series is ready to breathe fire once again.
For the first time in over 20 years, a Dungeons & Dragons movie is in production. Today, Paramount officially announced the project’s official title, cast, and release date. The film is called Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. (That’s its official logo above.) It stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, and Hugh Grant. Directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, whose previous films include Vacation and Game Night, the movie will premiere in March of 2023.
Paramount surely hopes for a better outcome than the last Dungeons & Dragons movie, which was released in theaters in the year 2000. That film, directed by Courtney Solomon and starring Justin Whalin, Marlon Wayans, Thora Birch, and Jeremy Irons, got terrible reviews and was a flop at the box office. (A sample review excerpt, from A.O. Scott in The New York Times: “Stew, unfortunately, is just what the new movie resembles, not only thematically but visually as well. It’s clotted with computer-generated special effects so murky that they seem to have been generated during a brownout.”)
Despite the initial movie’s failure, Dungeons & Dragons remains the gold standard among role-playing games to this day. Now almost 50 years old, D&D has generated more than $1 billion in sales, and supposedly has seen a resurgence in players and interest in recent years. So this franchise reboot could be coming along at just the right time.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is scheduled to open in theaters on March 3, 2023.