Will Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves have a sequel or spinoff? Will R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’urden feature in a future D&D movie? Will Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez return to the D&D world? The directors told us everything.
With Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in theaters and Critical Role’s animated series The Legend of Vox Machina fresh off its second season, it feels like D&D onscreen is having a particularly mainstream moment. Is this just the start of a bigger D&D screen franchise? Is Honor Among Thieves headed for a sequel, a movie series, or a bunch of spinoffs? Polygon asked writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein what form they’d like to see future D&D stories take.
“I think stop-motion,” Daley says, without hesitation. “Rankin/Bass style, a total throwback.”
Daley means it as a joke. But it isn’t the worst idea, given stop-motion animation’s recent micro-boom: A new Netflix movie from Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick and Guillermo del Toro’s extremely dark, Oscar-nominated take on Pinocchio both arrived late last year, and 2023 will see a new Chicken Run sequel and two new Wes Anderson films that will reportedly include stop-motion. Any form of animation might be a good approach for Dungeons & Dragons’ rich fantasy worlds. But Daley and Goldstein aren’t actually thinking about next steps quite yet.Will Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves get a sequel?
“It was never our intention when we came on board this film to make a franchise,” Daley says. “I think that would cloud our ability to focus entirely on the film at hand. The cardinal mistake many studios make is to put the cart before the horse, where they start crafting a cinematic universe before they even make a good single film. So first and foremost for us was getting this right.”
That’s a refreshing attitude in a world where studios keep forgetting to start small and build a fandom organically, instead of trying to kickstart a 10-year mega-blockbuster plan with every new movie.
