There's been talk of a Dungeons & Dragons TV show in the works at some streamer or another for many years. According to Deadline, one finally might go forward at Netflix: The Forgotten Realms.
Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy role-playing game where players sit around a table, roll dice, and pretend to be elves and wizards and warriors and so on. You probably already knew that, but we've gotta be thorough. Forgotten Realms is the name of a hugely popular campaign setting first introduced in 1987. It's the setting for a lot of D&D books, games comics and the 2023 movie Honor Among Thieves, although this show seemingly has no direct connection to the film.
Drew Crevello wrote the pilot for The Forgotton Realms and will serve as showrunner. But the biggest name attached to it is Shawn Levy. In addition to co-writing and directing the billion-dollar Marvel movie Deadpool & Wolverine, Levy is an executive producer on Stranger Things, a Netflix show where D&D is regular motif.
Dungeons & Dragons show have fallen through before, but I'm betting that this one makes it to the finish line. The power of Netflix can move mountains. The story can go in almost direction you can imagine. According to Deadline, if the show is a success, it could launch a "D&D universe," because of course it could. Whenever anybody in Hollywood creates anything these days, they're salivating over the possibility that it will turn into a shared universe of movies and TV shows.
And the world of Dungeons & Dragons is so rich and deep, with such a wealth of source material to draw on, that it could conceivably sustain a shared universe, for better or worse. They just have to get their foot in the doors and their hooks into viewers, which has proven hard to do with this property. Honor Among Thieves had plenty of fans but did just so-so at the box office, making around $200 million on its $150 budget. A famously terrible Dungeons & Dragons movie came out in 2000, saved only by those moments where Jeremy Irons decided to go all the way over the top:
But again, if anybody can do it, it might be Netflix. The streamer hasn't officially ordered the show yet, but we'll keep an eye out.
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