Behind Hollywood’s Closed Doors, A-List Stars are Playing Dungeons & Dragons

While it’s not directly related to the videogame world, we’d be remiss not to mention news concerning Dungeons & Dragons, arguably the most influential tabletop role-playing game ever devised. The Hollywood Reporter has a new piece on the popularity of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax’s creation behind the scenes of Hollywood, and the studios attempts to bring it to the big screen, so far with very little success.

Here’s an excerpt on the new D&D movie that is tentatively slated for a 2018 theatrical release:

Hollywood has, from time to time, attempted to adapt Dungeons & Dragons for the screen — the 1982 TV movie Mazes and Monsters starred Tom Hanks as a college student who suffers a psychotic break while playing the game — but such efforts usually end poorly. The most recent official Dungeons & Dragons theatrical release, a 2000 film with that title starring Jeremy Irons, was a critical and box-office flop. Undeterred, Warner Bros. is taking another stab at a big-screen version, based on a script by David Leslie Johnson (The Conjuring 2), with Goosebumps’ Rob Letterman attached to direct. Expect it in theaters when the half-moon rises over the elf patch — in other words, sometime in 2018. “We start shooting next year,” says Greg Silverman, 43, president of creative development and worldwide production at Warner Bros., himself a lifelong D&D fan who has passed the RPG gene to his 13-year-old son Cooper. “The movie should be really, really fun.”

Still, even among D&D’s most hard-core fans — including 31-year-old Deborah Ann Woll, star of Netflix’s Daredevil and a seasoned Dungeon Master who has spent hours drafting maps from scratch and devising intricate strategies — there is deep skepticism that any film version can capture the essence of what makes the game so beloved. “The adventures I’ve had in Dungeons & Dragons will always be more exciting than anything they could put on a screen,” she says, “because it was me and I lived it, and it was spontaneous. That’s just always going to be more exciting.”