You are going to find near countless reviews, in print and video, of the new Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves, so I am not going to rehash all the things you’ve probably already read or watched a hundred times over.
I would like to add my enthusiastic thumbs up to the chorus of gamers (and non-gamers) who enjoyed this movie. It’s fun. It’s funny. It’s got heart. It is everything I hoped for from a Dungeons & Dragons movie.
It legitimately feels like a game session. That’s what I want from a D&D movie: a sense that it is a game shared among friends. That’s the feeling this thing gave me and for that I am thankful.
I recommend you go see it for yourself. I think you’ll like it. It gets a lot of things right. And the niggly-bits that are wrong, like wild shape and time stop, fall under “House Rules” in my book.
The most grievous error was not the “Based on Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons” tag at the end of the movie. That is a fair assessment. This was based on the current iteration of the game. It’s very 5e in feel. Maybe even D&D One, or whatever the new edition is going to be called.
No, the big error, the one that stings, is that there is no credit given to the creators of Dungeons & Dragons and the Forgotten Realms. Would it really have been so hard to drop in a “Dungeons & Dragons, created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson”? Was it really too difficult to put “The Forgotten Realms, created by Ed Greenwood” up on the screen?
Hasbro seems to be in the business of making grievous errors, of offending their core base.
Look. I want this movie to succeed. I want it to make a Brinks Truck amount of coin. Why? Because I want more D&D on the big and small screen.
I want a sequel because I want more Red Wizards.
I want Joe Manganiello’s Dragonlance series to happen. I want Ravenloft! I want to see Bob Salvatore’s original Icewind Dale trilogy to get made. I want all of this and more.
But I also want respect given to the people whose creative energies brought these things to life.
Respect the creators. Respect the fans, old and new.
Come on, Hasbro. Do the right thing.
Bordermen Games 