Excellent ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Movie Gets Disappointing Sequel Update

I had an after-school Dungeons & Dragons group when I was in 7th grade. It didn’t last too long, as two of the three other kids quickly realized they couldn’t adhere to the schedule, and the other one wanted to go talk to girls instead, but we existed long enough to have a teacher warn us of the evils of Satanism. Now, to be clear, D&D has never been a path to committing evil deeds in the name of the dark lord, but that certainly wasn’t the case in, like, 2002.

What’s even wilder is that I became a D&D fan thanks to the 2000 film that bore the same name, even though it was terrible. I don’t know if it was the first film that ever made me ask, “Wait, movies can be bad?” but it was definitely the first time I remember feeling that disappointment so viscerally. I popped that VHS in my VCR and sat bored for almost two hours, thinking that I’d at least get to see Marlon Wayans resurrected in the sequel that they were clearly going to make (which, to be fair, they did, but… yeah).

Somehow, despite being wildly disappointed, I walked away from that movie with a keen interest in a game that allowed you to join the ranks of warriors and wizards with little more than your imagination. It also seemed to me like an almost unadaptable property, especially after the Lord of the Rings films covered much of the same territory any D&D movie could. Save for several stellar episodes of Community, which recreated the feeling of playing the game, a movie just seemed like a bad idea, and yet!

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is an absolute bop, as the children say. The 2023 film expertly dumped us into the world of Owl Bears and gelatinous cubes with fun and adventure. It’s also super funny thanks to the writing/directing team of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (and an incredibly game cast with lots of chemistry). While the movie wasn’t a massive hit, it did well with critics and audiences and certainly has a following. So much so that a sequel script was ordered, but it seems like that’s as far as things will go.

Jonathan Goldstein was at SDCC this weekend and spoke about a possible sequel, according to Deadline (via Screenrant), and how that will likely not happen. “We actually wrote a sequel to Dungeons & Dragons. We were hired to write it,” he explained. “I don’t know that it will see the light of day for a number of financial reasons. They’re expensive movies to make, but it’d be great fun to do it. We love that cast, and we think we wrote something that fans would like.” That is a huge bummer, but I can’t say it doesn’t make sense.

Honor Among Thieves had a budget of $150 million. That is all onscreen, but the movie only made a little over $200 million at the box office. That is not a very good split. To be fair, movie theaters had yet to fully recover from the damage inflicted by COVID-19, but a studio executive certainly isn’t going to give them that kind of leeway. Still, it feels cosmically unfair that the Thora Birch-starring 2000 film wound up with two direct-to-video sequels while a far superior film likely gets none.