Developing a Dungeons and Dragons movie can’t be easy, with all the lore to incorporate and passionate fans to please. But life was made all the more difficult for the directors of the new movie, when plans had to be changed after watching Jumanji 2.
The Dungeons and Dragons movie release date is just around the corner now and the fantasy movie looks all kinds of fun judging by the trailer. It should come as no surprise, really, given how fun the actual RPG board game is, but the track record of videogame movies always leaves us with a bit of doubt over translations such as this.
Luckily, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, the directors of the upcoming DnD flick were keen to give their game adaptation a fresh spin. The pair told Variety how they changed the script for the adventure movie to set it apart from Jumanji’s legacy sequel.
Apparently, the original plan was for the DnD movie to feature people playing the game, but Jumanji The Next Level saw this idea scrapped. The fact the Dwayne Johnson movie saw real-life people trapped in the game was enough to send Goldstein and Daley in a different direction.
“The moment Jumanji came out, we said, ‘No, we can’t do this again,’” Daley explained. “Also, it does a little bit of a disservice. It reduces DnD to just a game and I think that there is so much that can be explored within that world. And it’s hard, stakes-wise, to care about a character that you know as an audience is being played by someone who’s safely in their home.”
Instead, the film will see “a lot of [the charaters] throwing ideas around, some of them kind of shitting on those ideas, and ultimately, seeing if that idea can come to come to fruition,” Daley added.
For Goldstein, this was crucial to doing the original game justice: “It was our way of capturing what goes on at the table when you’re playing DnD without breaking the fourth wall, or actually becoming meta with it.”
For more on the topic, check out our guide to the Jumanji 4 release date. Or, visit our sister site Wargamer and find out all about the Dnd classes list 5e, the best DnD character creators, the different DnD races and species, or the best DnD character sheets.