This is rather mixed news to me. Unlike the very loud minority of Gamers whining about “their culture” was hijacked by popular shows like Big Bang Theory (barely seen) and the novel Ready Player One (great book, crappy movie), I don’t have a problem. Besides, now the lily White Gamers can see how Black Americans felt when Vanilla Ice became a big deal! I don’t mind D&D stuff being more widely available and it warms my heart every time I witness more women playing or running the game! Same goes for non-Whites and transgendered people.
The down sides? Number one: I have absolutely no idea why the people behind the movie chose SXSW given how most industry assholes attending rarely play or did when they were in the “cool kids” clique or being their toadies. Hell, they’re not terribly smart managing SXSW’s core point: music and other forms of media. Number two: This is going to be a terribly crappy film. Hear me out. I saw the trailer and it screams, “LAZY HEIST MOVIE” or “OCEAN’S 11 with ELVES!” A friend said, isn’t that what D&D is about? My response was “rarely.” After how embarrassingly dumb the first flick was in 2000, it’s a good thing The Lord of the Rings succeeded. Others love to dump on The Hobbit and they’re only right on how it could’ve been just one long movie or two, three forced Jackson to seriously pad the story.
Anyway, a D&D movie shouldn’t be any different than a standard Fantasy movie. The only elements making it particular to the game are specific monsters, races and maybe throw in the game’s “celebrities” most know, aka Elminster or Vecna. TSR seemed to have the same struggle year’s ago when they made initial efforts into publishing fiction…just write a story without blatantly calling out game elements. It comes off stilted, dorky and too mercenary. Back in my GDW days, we often laughed at one in which the wizard practically said, “Stand back, I shall now cast Tenser’s Floating Disc!” I came across one in a Dark Sun novel I read for research too. The author flubbed a line from one of the characters and almost jumped into gaming jargon, I swear all he overlooked was stated how many hit dice the character would then have if he turned into this monster.
At its heart, Dungeons & Dragons evolved into a group storytelling game (contrary to Gygax’s adversarial nature) and a TV miniseries serves it better. Sure we have Critical Role on Amazon but let’s go with something more genuine, sincere and lost in the Fantasy. From the snippets, Critical Role is too self-aware and filled with clichés/inside jokes. In short, why Gamers got crap thrown at them during lunch hour in the cafeteria.
Do I want the movie to be a disaster? Nah. I will let the masses decide and maybe it does well enough like Star Trek or The Addams Family; they had great sequels overshadowing the mediocrity of their starts.