Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

• 1. Introduction

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  Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves premiered at South by Southwest on the 10th of March 2023. The film's existence owed as much to legal history as to creative ambition. A decade of competing visions, multiple studios, and a revolving door of writers and directors preceded that night. The two directors who ultimately made the film, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, came to the project entirely by accident.

  Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez lead an ensemble cast of misfits in a fantasy heist. They set out to steal an ancient relic, only to find themselves caught between a scheming villain and a greater supernatural threat. The film needed to appeal to two audiences at once. One group had played Dungeons & Dragons for years; the other had never touched the game.

  Writing after the premiere, A.A. Dowd noted that the audience response at the Paramount Theatre suggested the film could outperform early expectations.

• 2. A Decade of False Starts

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  In May 2013, Warner Bros. Pictures and Courtney Solomon's Sweetpea Entertainment announced a film based on Dungeons & Dragons. David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick would write the screenplay. Roy Lee, Alan Zeman, and Solomon were set to produce. Two days after that announcement, Hasbro issued a lawsuit. Hasbro claimed it was co-producing its own Dungeons & Dragons film at Universal Pictures, with Chris Morgan attached as writer and director.

  In August 2015, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee urged both parties to reach a settlement. The Warner Bros. film was set for pre-production with Hasbro. Rob Letterman entered negotiations to direct in March 2016, with his role confirmed by May. In April 2017, Joe Manganiello publicly revealed that he had written a script for the project. Manganiello, an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, had co-written it with John Cassel. He was "talking to all the right parties" to make the film happen. He was also working with Brad Peyton and Dwayne Johnson, who were both negotiating to develop the film.

  In December 2017, the film moved from Warner Bros. to Paramount Pictures, with a release date set for the 23rd of July 2021. Paramount brought in Chris McKay to direct and Michael Gilio to write. By March 2019, Gilio had completed a first draft that generated genuine excitement at the studio. In July 2019, Paramount gave the script to Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley.

  John Francis Daley was at a sports bar in Sherman Oaks when the opportunity found him. He was watching a game between the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Daley mentioned to a literary agent nearby that he and Goldstein had stepped away from directing The Flash. The agent asked if they were looking for work. Paramount heard about the conversation and called shortly after.

  The release date, originally set for the 23rd of July 2021, would shift four more times before the film arrived in theaters on the 31st of March 2023.

• 3. Writing the World

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  By January 2020, Goldstein and Daley had completed an entirely new draft of the screenplay. They named four films as key influences on the tone: The Princess Bride, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones. The Indiana Jones structure appealed to them most directly, evoking both the dungeon crawl and the heist film. John Francis Daley noted that the heist genre is immediately legible to most audiences. That familiarity would let newcomers follow what the characters were after without being overwhelmed by lore or unfamiliar terminology.

  Goldstein focused on a structural challenge at the center of fantasy storytelling: the problem of magic. If a character can resolve any conflict with a spell, meaningful drama becomes nearly impossible. The film drew on the actual Dungeons & Dragons magic system. Magic users combine physical gestures with spoken incantations; they cannot simply wave their hands and solve the plot. Justice Smith, playing sorcerer Simon Aumar, worked with a choreographer to develop a unique sequence of gestures for each spell, incorporating actual sign language into many of them.

  The film is set in the Forgotten Realms, an established campaign setting from the Dungeons & Dragons game. Goldstein described the tone they wanted: respectful of the source material but never stiff, and definitely not a spoof. A reviewer for the Austin Chronicle identified the logic behind choosing the heist structure. Most tabletop campaigns center on a group of strangers completing a job together. That shared architecture made the heist film a natural bridge between longtime players and newcomers.

  The screenplay gave shared credit to Daley, Goldstein, and Gilio; McKay and Gilio received credit for the story.

• 4. On Location

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  Filming began in early April 2021 in Iceland, with a crew of 60-70 people for the opening location shoot. Principal photography then moved to Belfast, Northern Ireland. On the 19th of August 2021, Daley announced that filming had wrapped. Visual effects work was shared among Industrial Light & Magic, Moving Picture Company, and Crafty Apes.

  Before cameras rolled in Northern Ireland, Goldstein organized a several-hours-long game of Dungeons & Dragons with the cast. Each actor played as their film character. Goldstein said that what he and Daley learned during that session was incorporated into the finished film.

  Bradley Cooper joined the production during post-production, cast as Marlamin, Holga's halfling ex-husband. Cooper filmed his scenes entirely on blue screen; his footage was then inserted into sequences already shot with Michelle Rodriguez.

  Lorne Balfe composed the film's score. Balfe had played Dungeons & Dragons himself. When he heard a film was being made, he said he knew immediately that he wanted to be part of the team. On the 10th of March 2023, Tame Impala released the single "Wings of Time" for the film. The soundtrack album followed on the 31st of March 2023, released by Mercury Classics Soundtracks & Scores.

  A companion album was released on the 23rd of June 2023. It collected fourteen songs inspired by the world of Dungeons & Dragons taverns, written by Balfe together with Goldstein and Daley.

• 5. Critics and Commerce

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  Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves opened in the United States and Canada with $37.2 million in its first weekend, drawn from 3,850 theaters. The studio had projected the opening would fall between $30 million and $40 million. The audience was 61% male; 63% were between 18 and 34 years old.

  The second weekend brought $13.9 million, a drop of 62%. The third weekend earned $7.5 million, a further decline of 46%. The final domestic tally reached $93.3 million. International markets added $114.9 million, for a worldwide gross of $208.2 million against a production budget of $150 million. Screen Rant called the film a "box office bomb." Poor marketing and competition from The Super Mario Bros. Movie were named as contributing factors. A fan boycott of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast was also cited.

  CinemaScore respondents gave the film an average grade of "A-" on an A+ to F scale. PostTrak found that 90% of those polled gave a positive score, with 77% saying they would definitely recommend it.

  Nicholas Barber, writing for the BBC, said the filmmakers had followed the Marvel Studios model of hiring comedy directors to make a blockbuster. The result, he wrote, was a "feelgood, family-friendly caper." Glen Weldon, for NPR, described the plot as a series of fetch quests. He added that objecting to that structure in a Dungeons & Dragons film made about as much sense as objecting to spelling in a Scrabble movie. Regé-Jean Page, playing the paladin Xenk, drew particular notice; one critic described his performance as conveying "hauteur and supreme confidence" layered with a "guileless sincerity."

  Benjamin Lee, writing for The Guardian, said that while Pine and Rodriguez had genuine chemistry together, the film's comedy did not land as reliably as it should have. G. Allen Johnson, for the San Francisco Chronicle, compared the film to a Marvel movie recast with Dungeons & Dragons characters. He likened the result to what might emerge from asking ChatGPT to write exactly that.

  The Saturn Awards named the film Best Fantasy Film at a ceremony on the 4th of February 2024.

• 6. After the Credits

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  In April 2023, John Francis Daley told Polygon that making a franchise had never been the intention. "It was never our intention when we came on board this film to make a franchise," he said. Goldstein added that if they returned to the world, they would continue with the established characters while bringing in new figures alongside them.

  Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins confirmed in July 2023 that a sequel was still under consideration. The condition was a smaller production budget, given the first film's box office performance.

  In February 2022, a spin-off television series was announced as part of a broader Dungeons & Dragons franchise. The show was described as the flagship live-action series among multiple projects in development. Paramount+ ordered eight episodes in January 2023, with Rawson Marshall Thurber set to write and direct the pilot. In May 2024, Paramount+ announced it would not move forward. Hasbro's in-house division took over, following eOne's sale to Lionsgate in December 2023. A new creative team would then bring the project to other potential buyers.

  A prequel publishing campaign launched in February 2023, ahead of the film's theatrical release. E.K. Johnston wrote a young adult novel centered on Doric, The Druid's Call. Jaleigh Johnson wrote an adult novel following Edgin Darvis, The Road to Neverwinter. A 96-page prequel graphic novel covered Edgin's crew with a back-up story about Xenk. Jeremy Lambert and Ellen Boener wrote it; Eduardo Ferigato and Guillermo Sanna drew the art. The adventure anthology Keys from the Golden Vault featured a heist set in Revel's End, the maximum-security prison created for the movie.

  On the 11th of August 2024, the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation went to the film. Daley, Goldstein, and Gilio all received the honor for their work on the screenplay and direction.

  Wizards of the Coast released free Dungeons & Dragons stat blocks for the film's main characters on D&D Beyond. Players received the tools to bring Edgin, Holga, and their companions into whatever campaigns they chose to run.