Dungeons & Dragons (2000 film)

Izmir's young Empress, Savina, rules with the power of a scepter that allows her to control gold dragons. When she wants to give rights to the common people, she's opposed by the Council of Mages, led by the evil Profion. They demand that she hand over the scepter. She refuses and, anticipating a conflict, both sides try to get their hands on the legendary Rod of Savrille, which would let them control red dragons. Teenage thieves Ridley and Snails try to rob the Sumdall magic school. They're caught by a young apprentice named Marina, just as Profion's assistant Damodar attacks the library wizard to get his map to the Rod of Savrille. Marina, Ridley, and Snails manage to escape with the map, and join with a dwarf named Elwood. They discover that to enter the tomb containing the Rod, they need a ruby key called the "Eye of the Dragon." Ridley finds it in a deadly maze in the thieves' guild in Antius, but Damodar arrives and captures Marina and the map before they can flee. The rest of the group escape, only to be captured by the elf Norda, a paladin who is working for the Empress. Realizing they are fighting for the same cause, they free Marina and get the map back, although Snails dies in the attempt. They get the Rod of Savrille, although Damodar takes it from them and gives it to Profion. He and the other mages fight against the Empress, with dragons on both sides, until Ridley kills Damodar, and gets the Rod of Savrille back from Profion. Marina encourages Ridley to use the Rod to bring Profion down, but Ridley, realizing the Rod's power will corrupt him, refuses and destroys it. Then the Empress has a gold dragon kill Profion. Ridley later visits the grave of Snails with Marina, Elwood, and Norda. When he places the Eye of the Dragon on the grave, the ruby starts to glow and Snails' name disappears. Norda tells Ridley to not question his gift and that "his friend awaits him", and the ruby transports the group away to a mysterious place. == Cast ==

Dave Arneson, the co-creator of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, makes a cameo appearance in deleted scenes. == Development ==

Background The earliest attempt at a feature-length adaptation of a Dungeons & Dragons property by the major film industry date to the early 1980s, as there was a strong interest in producing a film based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons; Gary Gygax had several discussions with producers and agents about the idea, and a screenplay by James Goldman received eyeballs from major studios. However, nothing came about this due to conflicts between TSR and the studios. Solomon obtained an option from TSR after writing a 30-page proposal showing how he would adapt the game and going through three months of "intense" broker dealing with the game publisher. Solomon went on an 18-month-long trip across the world funding the film once a draft of the screenplay was completed, and most of the financing depended on foreign distribution rights. During the trip, he met a leading businessman in Asia named Allan Zeman, who viewed the 24-year-old as a "young, ambitious, artistic person" as well as a "convincing salesman" of a project based on an enterprise with a huge fanbase. In early 1992, Zeman and Solomon formed Sweetpea Entertainment to fund Dungeons & Dragons and sell it to other investors. Originally, Solomon planned to have Dungeons & Dragons be a $100 million studio project with a big name in the director's chair; during development, Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron, Renny Harlin, and Stan Winston were attached for directing the film at one point but dropped out. In addition to the script receiving positive coverage from the magazine Movieline, Cameron considered the project just before he did Titanic (1997), but the deal did not suffice due to TSR's failure to come up with a merchandising deal that appealed to 20th Century Fox, where Cameron worked. Silver came in with the vision to make it a television series instead of a film. to begin pre-production on February 9, 1998. Solomon claimed the final product is a collection of different scenes from 16 drafts. he felt using specific campaign settings heavily dependent on player interpretation would confuse viewers. He also had to risk the combat actions not reflecting how players would use them; for example, "somebody could be casting one of those spells and standing there for ten minutes until the spell is ready to go," explained Solomon. this resulted in the inclusion of actors like the Fourth Doctor actor Tom Baker and Richard O'Brien, whom Solomon cast with knowledge of his performance as Riff Raff in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), a film released the same year as the first Dungeons & Dragons game. Thora Birch was cast for the project shortly after she finished filming American Beauty (1999) and before she became a breakthrough actress once it was released; Birch, Whalin, and Kristen Wilson were cast before the start of principal photography. Leahy originally wrote the elf Liana (later named Norda) to be a black elf, but after contention from his peers, he changed her race to Asian; she was a black elf in the final cut. The meeting happened, with Solomon and the other producers agreeing with Wilson. Lee Arenberg and Irons joined during filming, The producers originally look for an actor under five feet, but Arenberg went in the audition room and told them, "I have a few more inches but a foot more talent than the other short people." When looking for the empress Savina, according to Solomon, "that was one of the toughest characters to cast because I was looking to find somebody that young to play the role, because that's what that character called for, but I also needed somebody with a depth to her and understanding that's beyond her years." == Production ==

Filming location was the interior for Profion's lair. Shooting of Dungeons & Dragons took place from May 28 to the middle of August 1999 in Prague, with a two-week rehearsal period that included eight days of a cast read-through at Solomon's apartment just before. The battle is eleven minutes long, required more than 280 shots, and was filmed on a 360-degree panoramic blue screen stage due to it involving more than 150 computer-generated dragons; it was tough for the actors as they had to fight while imagining dragons were around them, and it was tough for the director because the actors could not interact with the dragons that would be imposed in post-production later. He described his role as the hardest he'd ever done, primarily due to having to perform actions scenes while wearing a red beard that "itched like crazy" and "about 50 pounds of clothing complete with padding." When directing Wayans' improvisational method of acting, Solomon offered him the ability to perform three ad-libs in exchange for properly saying three lines in the script. O'Brien also improvised lines, such as "oh, what a romantic notion" in a scene after Ridley goes through the Thieve's Maze; the line was scripted as "honor is for fools, my friend," but the actor dismissed it as "cliched swords-and-sworcery kind of dialog." and Arenberg who was a casual player, Jeremy Irons learned a bit about it from his sons who were fans, and Whalin prepared for his role by watching Dungeons & Dragons games in person, but then "realized that it seemed to be mostly about arguing" and "just put my trust in the script." While not a player, Wilson's knowledge of the game came from groups of her high school peers playing it: "I remembered stories that I heard about kids committing suicide, and all this other nutty stuff. But I didn't really know anything about it. I knew that it was a fantasy game ..a roleplaying game and THAT interested me." When working on the battle sequences, Solomon and the actors had a strong emphasis on making sure they followed the rules of the original game. Most of the principal actors did the stunts themselves, with choreographer Graeme Crowther recalling only "two or three" times a double was required; in fact, when shooting the Thief's Maze sequence on the film's last day of principal photography, Whalin intentionally wanted the first 300-pound steel axe as close as possible to him in the frame, which Solomon agreed. The actors' fighting styles varied from Ridley's "quick and dirty" yet "smooth" movements to Elwood's hardcore methods to Norda's artsy "fluid," art-like maneuvering, which Wilson attributed to her background in dancing. However, the effects team had some difficulties. Most of the conception process involved members coming up with various concepts but never agreeing to final designs, meaning compromises had to be determined under deadlines during filming; Astles suggested more time could've been saved if the crew simply borrowed from Dungeons & Dragons books instead of trying to "cleverly expand" the game's universe. According to Gibbs, the workflow was made even more burdensome by the "communist" nature of the Czech Republic's film industry, especially for a big-scale fantasy film. The country's recently passed importing laws prevented the makeup people from using the glue specifically designed for the elf ears, meaning the elf actors had to wear more incompatible adhesives. There were also scheduling delays due to properties such as weapons and castle walls made by the Czech crew being poorly manufactured and having to be redone. Human-crafted special effects included the steel axes in the maze scene, the Corridor of Eyes made all out of stones, and the poly-glass crystals on the balustrade walls of the Magic school, the most challenging one being to reproduce the crystals into breakaway glass. For creating the quicksand carpet, a water tank that made up two meters of the floor was used; it was filled with 6,000 liters of Quaker Oats (the only thickening substance available that did not sink to the ground) on a platform lifted up and down by a scissor lift. There were issues the effects crew did not foresee with the use of the porridge, such as it bubbling away into the air as a reaction to a preservative used to keep it from being moldy. With the carpet scene requiring three takes, Wayans described it as "probably the worst thing I've ever had to do in a movie. I grew up in the projects eating oatmeal, and I didn't want to ever eat it again, anyway. Now I really want to stay away from it." == Post-production ==

Digital effects The computer effects were done by Station X and Blankety Blank. Station X's founder, Grant Boucher, had experience in writing for Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game and offered free advice to the crew despite not officially considered part of the production. There were also concepts originally planned to be practical effects but were computer-generated in the final edit; this included the gyroscope that holds the scepter, which was initially a machine-controlled device where all attempts for the motors to control it properly failed, and Dexter the pocket dragon which was planned to be an animatronic dragon. For the dragons, the animators focused the most on their flying and diving cycles, using hawks and eagles as references, as well as their skin, where reptiles such as crocodiles were observed in producing the textures. While the dragons were computer-generated, the fire they blew was done using practical effects, and to be digitally incorporated, the flame throwers were filmed outside during the night time and blown into a steel set hanging on its side. Music Justin Burnett was hired as the composer for Dungeons & Dragons, beginning with scoring the test sequence Solomon filmed to convince Silver to become executive producer; which was a change of the rock orchestral rock style he used when composing for German television series. It was the composer's third full-length film and his first to use live symphonic orchestra arrangements, with samples for percussion and a few ethnically-tinged instruments; with a "mock-up" score written in a digital sequencer, it was then performed by the Perth Symphony Orchestra in seven recording sessions engineered by Mal Luker. Themes in the score include those for Savina, Profion, Damodar, Ridley and Marina's relationship, Ridley and Snails' friendship, and a "payoff" theme for Ridley inspired by Williams' one for Indiana Jones. == Promotion and release ==

Production, release and plot information about the film, as well as original game creator Dave Arneson's time on set, were all discussed at the August 1999 Gen Con seminar "History of Roleplaying Games," hosted by Boucher and Arneson. Role-playing supplements of the film were also announced in development at the same convention. On May 19, 2000, it revealed a teaser poster. When principal photography finished, the release date was planned at the earliest to be August 2000, which would coincide with the publication of the third edition of the game, or Halloween 2000 at the latest if post-production went on longer than expected. New Line set the domestic release date sometime near the end of the year; the producers originally wanted the release to be in the spring or summer of 2001 to open up more time for setting up licensing and tie-in deals, but none of Warner Bros' divisions agreed to it. Neal Barrett Jr. wrote the novel Dungeons & Dragons: The Movie, based on the film. == Reception ==

Box office The film opened at #5 at the North American box office making US$7,237,422 in its opening weekend. The film went on to gross $15,220,685 in the domestic box office, short of the film's $45 million budget, and with an international gross of $18,586,724, coming up with a worldwide total of $33,807,409. Critical response Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "C+" on a scale of A to F. Geoff Pevere of the Toronto Star called the film "A wheezy quest story steeped in hobbity gibberish and second-hand Star Wars costumery, featuring a cast so uniformly uncharismatic you may pine for the methody depths of Kerwin Mathews (apart, of course, from the reversely charismatic Irons), the movie has the cheap software look of something found on the Space channel at 4 a.m.". Steve Biodrowski of mania.com comments: "Let's just say that if it weren't for Lost Souls (also a New Line release, coincidentally), this would be a strong contender for the Worst Film of the Year." In February 2010, the readers of Empire voted Dungeons & Dragons the 39th worst film of all time. A. O. Scott panned the fight choreography, computer-generated effects, and Birch's acting, and compared the dialogue and pacing to that of the Pokémon films. Solomon blamed the quality of the film on its investors and license-holders' interference, as well as his own inexperience in filmmaking. He states that he had only intended to produce the film, but was forced to direct by his investors after nearly a decade of complications dealing with TSR and Wizards of the Coast. He also claims that he was forced to use an older script despite having written an updated version that fit the Dungeons and Dragons license better. Awards and nominations ==Roleplaying game==

Wizards of the Coast released a Fast-Play Game based on the movie called "The Sewers of Sumdall". It is a DVD-ROM feature on the DVD as a printable PDF file. ==Reboot==

Starting in 2015, a new Dungeons & Dragons film began development at Warner Bros. Pictures with the film reportedly starring Ansel Elgort and Rob Letterman directing. In December 2017, after varying degrees of progression the film was moved to Paramount Pictures, Sweetpea Entertainment, and Allspark Pictures, scheduled for release date of July 23, 2021. That same year, Joe Manganiello, an avid fan of the role-playing game, took it upon himself to revitalize the progression of a film adaptation. The actor revealed that he had been negotiating the rights to make the film, while Manganiello and John Cassel were hired to co-write the script for the project. By February 2018, the project had reentered development as a co-production with Brian Goldner and Stephen Davis producing from Paramount Pictures, and Allspark Pictures. Negotiations began with Chris McKay to serve as director. David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick had completed a draft of the script. In March 2019, it was revealed that Michael Gillio had completed a rewrite of Johnson-McGoldrick's work with studio executives expressing excitement for the film. The studio began negotiations to casting for the roles. In July 2019, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein entered early negotiations to direct the film. By January 2020, the filmmaking duo announced that they had co-written a new draft of the script. The film, entitled Honor Among Thieves, was released in March 2023. Starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis and Hugh Grant, it received largely positive reviews from critics and audiences, but was commercially unsuccessful. ==References==