Dungeons & Dragons 2 has a finished script and nobody to pay for it.
Directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein confirmed the sequel screenplay is complete in a new interview with The Playlist promoting their Apple TV movie Mayday.
Paramount-Skydance passed on the sequel for financial reasons. Hasbro still wants it made and is now looking for another studio to finance it.
The financial reasons aren’t hard to figure out.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves grossed $208 million worldwide on a $150 million budget, with a break-even closer to $375 million.
Reviews were good. It didn’t matter, because the movie took epic high fantasy and ran it through the same Guardians of the Galaxy formula Hollywood has done to death: nonstop wisecracks, nobody on screen taking any of it seriously. Audiences skipped it.
Hasbro Is “A Big Believer” In The Sequel
Asked if anyone is still trying to make the money work, Goldstein said yes.
“Yeah, absolutely,” Goldstein said. “I think Hasbro is a big believer in it, and if they can figure out a studio partner to make it work, they’ll want to proceed. As are our producers.”
Daley said the sequel is personal for them.
“I mean, look, it’s something that is near and dear to our hearts in that we loved making the first one,” Daley said.
“We fell in love with the characters, and there’s so much potential in a sequel because the first act isn’t filled with exposition or introduction to this family that we’ve already become accustomed to,” he continued. “So you can kind of launch right into the story, which is really nice.”
He also admitted the money is the whole problem.
“Yes, there are practical realities with the finance contingent, and who knows if it ever gets made, but we were proud of the sequel script and hope that at some point it does find a path,” Daley said.
Daley Blames Super Mario And The D&D License Boycott
Daley’s explanation for the first movie’s box office is the release date.
Honor Among Thieves opened in March 2023, four days before The Super Mario Bros. Movie and a month after Wizards of the Coast changed the D&D gaming license, which had fans boycotting the game.
“It was very much a product of not-so-great timing when the first movie came out,” Daley said. “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.”
“So it was a perfect storm of all of those elements,” he added.
Timing was part of it. The bigger part is that a $150 million fantasy tentpole played everything for laughs, and audiences stayed home.
The sequel talk came out of the same interview where the directors revealed their scrapped version of The Flash had a Bruce Wayne who never became Batman.
Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Regé-Jean Page, and Sophia Lillis starred in Honor Among Thieves. No casting has been announced for the sequel.
Daley and Goldstein’s Mayday, starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, streams September 4 on Apple TV.
