A spoiler-free first look at the Dungeons & Dragons movie digs into how much it feels like a real campaign, from Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate to the worldbuilding and spellcasting. In theaters March 31.
This initial spoiler-free take on Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves comes from the movie’s debut at the 2023 SXSW Conference. We’ll have more in-depth coverage as the movie’s release date approaches.
We’re living in a new golden age for fantasy movies and shows. Gone is the time when epic fantasy adventures were given low budgets that crippled production, or scripts that showed open disdain for the genre. Now, elves, dragons, and magic are as big a part of the pop culture zeitgeist as sitcoms were in the ’90s. And yet, thanks to the huge success of Game of Thrones, fantasy shows and movies are usually dark and bleak, both in tone and in visuals. That’s just one of many reasons why the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is such a shock to the system: It’s an attempt to prove that we’re finally ready to embrace the fun, chaos, and full-on weirdness of the fantasy genre.
What makes Dungeons & Dragons unique as a game is the way the system works as a huge sandbox. No two games are the same, even though players are using so many of the same tools. The new movie, from John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, based on a script written by Daley, Goldstein, and Michael Gilio, feels like an invitation to sit on the latest session in a campaign they’ve been running for years.
It’s like watching an episode of Critical Role and realizing the group hasn’t just crafted a good story out of the blue, they were playing together for a long time even before the cameras rolled. Even before Honor Among Thieves’ bard Edgin (Chris Pine) tells a story about his background so the audience can understand his motivation (his actual words), and we see his past adventures with most of the other characters, the movie feels like the latest chapter in a very long and intricate story.
This is what the best stories do: They invite you into an expansive, intricate world that feels like it existed long before these characters entered the story, and far beyond this particular adventure. Honor Among Thieves aces that worldbuilding. It name-drops several key D&D locations, like Baldur’s Gate and Waterdeep. But the real sense of connection for fans of the game comes in the way the film uses real sets and locations to convey the grandeur and size of the world, and populates them with a ton of characters and background sights, from ruins to ancient monuments.
