Dragonlance Joe Manganelio is Writing the D&D Movie? And Is it DRAGONLANCE?

Actor Joe Manganelio (from True Blood, Magic Mike, and more) appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, and reported that he is co-writing a movie script. While he doesn't namecheck D&D, his description sounds a lot like it, and he did recently meet up with WotC. "Last year with a playwright I went to Carnegie Mellon with, I actually made a draft of a film, and now we're talking to all the right parties. I had a two-day creative summit with the Wizards of the Coast...we had like a two-day summit about where the movie could go or TV series, products, synergy, the whole deal… Obviously, there's a spectacle. There's dragons breathing fire and lightning. But what makes a great superhero or fantasy movie is the human aspect. It's got to be about something. We root for those characters in Game of Thrones. Fellowship of the Ring was about friendship, this undying love for your friends. That's something everyone can identify with. When a movie is about something human and real emotionally people are going to want to see. Then you get some dragons breathing fire, and hey, I'm in." And to add fuel to the fire, he even tweets a photo of a DRAGONLANCE script! (thanks to darjr for the scoop)

The D&D movie is being directed by Rob Letterman (Goosebumps, Monsters vs. Aliens, Shark Tale), produced by Rob Lee (The Lego Movie, How To Train Your Dragon) and was/maybe still is being penned by David Leslie Johnson (Wrath of the Titans). Previous reports indicated that "This new Dungeons & Dragons will be a Guardians of the Galaxy-tone movie in a Tolkien-like universe. Because when you think of all the Hobbit movies and The Lord of the Rings, they have an earnestness to them, and to see something fun, a Raiders romp inside that world, I feel is something the audience has not seen before." and that "producers are eyeing a Vin Diesel-type for the film’s lead characters".

Of course, we also know that Vin Diesel plays D&D, as does Joe Manganiello.

So is he co-writing the D&D movie or is that something else? To add to the rumour pile, he tweeted an image of a DRAGONLANCE script (shown below). Of course, he could be playing with us. But maybe there is something in it? His name isn't that script, nor is David Leslie Johnson's. Let the speculation begin!

Manganelio at WotC in February

Manganelio tweeted this image



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[Flexor the Mighty!]

For any D&D movie in general, after the relative bust that was Warcraft, would the folks making the first movie or two even consider using orcs as enemies or include a half-orc character? I personally hope they would not.

I played WoW for a while so I like the setting to a degree but the WoW movie looked like a video game. While there is going to be CGI in any D&D flick I hope they don't make it look like that mess.

 

[Zarithar]

13 episode animated Dragonlance series on Netflix (covering Dragons of Autumn Twilight) would be awesome, especially considering how well recent Netflix series like Voltron and Trollhunters have done.

Trollhunters is an excellent show... one of my current top 5. it is so well done.

 

[TwoSix]

I played WoW for a while so I like the setting to a degree but the WoW movie looked like a video game. While there is going to be CGI in any D&D flick I hope they don't make it look like that mess.

Sure, but I think that was intentional. Part of WoW's enduring success is that it doesn't try to look realistic, the graphics age well because the cartoonish look is the goal. The director was enough of a WoW fan that emulating that look cinematically was intentional.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

For any D&D movie in general, after the relative bust that was Warcraft, would the folks making the first movie or two even consider using orcs as enemies or include a half-orc character? I personally hope they would not.

Fortunately there are a lot of cannon fodder races (CFR) in D&D. I would prefer hobgoblins myself. That being said, I suspect they will try to get the party close to 5th level pretty quickly, so I would be surprised if there was more than one encounter that focused on CFR's. If you know who is the star character, the drow will be the CFR.

 

[Oofta]

Sure, but I think that was intentional. Part of WoW's enduring success is that it doesn't try to look realistic, the graphics age well because the cartoonish look is the goal. The director was enough of a WoW fan that emulating that look cinematically was intentional.

I think the biggest visual issue with the movie was the uncanny valley. The orcs looked close to real, but not quite. It's a very difficult thing to get right.

The orcs in LOTR were more convincing because most (in closeups) were people in makeup. Gollum worked because he's a anthropomorphized/big-eyed creature. We don't expect him to look quite right.

The Hobbit movies occasionally fell into it (the goblin king scenes in particular) but even there it was a relatively small portion of the movie.

Most people can overlook a little silliness like Legolas climbing the oliphant, but the WOW movie simply had too much. IMHO they'd have been better off going all the way and making an animated pixar-like movie.

 

[Hussar]

While I understand why people look at Dragonlance and think, "Yup, three books, three movies", there's an awful lot of things you can cut out of the storyline and still tell a Dragonlance movie. As a fan? Sure, I want 6-9 hours of Dragonlance. But, being realistic, I think we'll be lucky to get one movie. Cut out most of the second book and tell most of the first book in the first twenty minutes of the movie.

Will fans be pissed off? Probably. But, at the end of the day, it will likely appeal to a broader audience if you don't dive too deeply into all the little side stories that were going on.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

While I understand why people look at Dragonlance and think, "Yup, three books, three movies", there's an awful lot of things you can cut out of the storyline and still tell a Dragonlance movie. As a fan? Sure, I want 6-9 hours of Dragonlance. But, being realistic, I think we'll be lucky to get one movie. Cut out most of the second book and tell most of the first book in the first twenty minutes of the movie.

Will fans be pissed off? Probably. But, at the end of the day, it will likely appeal to a broader audience if you don't dive too deeply into all the little side stories that were going on.

Nah. I'd rather not even see the project realized, than the first book told in 20 minutes. Or lose even a quarter of Book 2. Some trimming has to happen, sure, but *far, far less* than was the case for LOTR, for example.

 

[Demetrios1453]

While I understand why people look at Dragonlance and think, "Yup, three books, three movies", there's an awful lot of things you can cut out of the storyline and still tell a Dragonlance movie. As a fan? Sure, I want 6-9 hours of Dragonlance. But, being realistic, I think we'll be lucky to get one movie. Cut out most of the second book and tell most of the first book in the first twenty minutes of the movie.

Will fans be pissed off? Probably. But, at the end of the day, it will likely appeal to a broader audience if you don't dive too deeply into all the little side stories that were going on.

Production companies are going to look for sequel possibilities, and with fantasy plotlines, in this post-LotR world, they are going to be looking for a trilogy. As the property is already a trilogy, well, that pretty much says it all.

Anyway, how in the world could you pare down the entire Dragonlance storyline so that it would fit into a single movie of reasonable length, without it becoming both incomprehensible and losing the plotlines which made it popular in the first place? I have a feeling that any attempt to do that would alienate more of the general audience than a trilogy would. After all, in this day and age, audiences are perfectly fine with stories that play out over several movies (see: Marvel).

In any case, I have a feeling they would be adding more, not less. It certainly wouldn't hurt to incorporate at least the bare bones of some of the plot of Dragons of the Highlord Skies into any prospective second film, simply to keep it from being jarring when we cut back to the western group of the main party, who we haven't seen since Tarsis, all of a sudden being inexplicably on a boat, with a dragon orb, and being chased by a white dragon. That jump cut was jarring enough in the novel; I don't see how it could be done in a movie without totally confusing the audience (or settling for a disappointing cop-out by giving a verbal recap of what happened).

 

[Hussar]

Nah. I'd rather not even see the project realized, than the first book told in 20 minutes. Or lose even a quarter of Book 2. Some trimming has to happen, sure, but *far, far less* than was the case for LOTR, for example.

Oh, the fanboy in me would be very disappointed. But, think about it this way - LotR clocks in at 450 000 (ish) words. So does Dragonlance. And they did trim rather a lot from the LotR books to fit it into 9 hours. And that's for one of the most beloved fantasy series of all time.

Dragonlance, as popular as it it, has nowhere near that level of interest. The odds that you're going to convince people that you need 9 hours to tell this story is pretty slim, IMO. Sure, I'd love it if they could, but, honestly, I think you're going to be lucky to get a 2.5 hour movie at all. Which means we're probably going to get an "inspired by" movie, rather than a straight up retelling.

 

[dco]

My heart is broken, I wanted a sequel to Pee-Wee's big holiday.