Time to roll the dice and save vs. bad movie!

[Tev]

There's a new D&D movie on the horizon!

A movie based on that titan of tabletop, Dungeons & Dragons, is moving ahead at Warner Bros., reports Variety.

After sorting through a rights dispute between Allspark Pictures and Sweetpea Entertainment, Warner Bros. is now in the clear. Allspark Pictures is a division of Hasbro Studios (a division of Hasbro, which produces the Dungeons & Dragons games), while Sweetpea Entertainment produced 2000's Dungeons & Dragons and 2005's Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God. Neither film was well received by critics and fans (Ed. note: or most people with eyeballs).

The solution is that both studios will produce the new flick, which already has a script set in Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms setting, familiar to many players and fantasy fans from R.A. Salvatore's novels as well as D&D games. David Leslie Johnson took writing duties on the project.

Despite the fact that Dungeons & Dragons is literally a storytelling engine, getting a decent film adaptation out of the license has historically been a game where almost everybody rolls 1s. If there's a ray of hope for Warner Bros.' latest effort, it's that one of the producers of The Lego Movie, Roy Lee, is involved. If Lego can get an Academy Award-nominated film to theaters, surely the time is right for Dungeons & Dragons to get a watchable film to theaters.

So it looks like Hasbro has finally finished its legal fight with Sweatpea Entertainment and has gotten some control of the D&D movie rights back under its thumb. It also sounds like they've got a Lego Movie producer on the payroll to make it not suck as much as the three previous ones.

Now to wait and see if this will end up being a bland generic fantasy action movie with some setting dressing (Forgotten Realms) and certain IP monsters and character races unique to D&D, or if this is going to be a badly done self-referential nerd-fest of shoving people in bags of holding, stopping by the corner magic shop to buy a +5 beholder-slaying sword of legends, and gamist jargon that only us insiders could hope to follow.