Despite Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves being well-received by critics and fans alike, the 2023 film, written and directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, didn’t perform particularly well at the box office. Daley and Goldstein have previously talked about a potential sequel—they’ve got a screenplay already written, but, apparently, Paramount isn’t interested in it.
That doesn’t mean there’s no hope, though: during a recent interview on the Playlist’s Discourse Podcast, Goldstein said Hasbro is looking for another studio to pick up the sequel. “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,” Goldstein said.
Of course, it might be tough to convince another studio to take a risk on the sequel when the first one only made $208 million against a $150 million budget. But, according to Daley, even that isn’t quite as disastrous as it sounds: there were a lot of contributing factors to the movie’s underperformance at the box office that could easily be mitigated the second time around.
“It was very much a product of not-so-great timing when the first movie came out. It came out four days before the Super Mario movie, which broke records,” Daley said. “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. Yeah, so it was a perfect storm of all of those elements, and we’ll see.”
So all they need to do is get Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast to stop making boneheaded decisions, not put the sequel up against a guaranteed box-office juggernaut, and have better marketing, and everything will be fine. That should be no problem at all.
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