Three years after the Dungeons and Dragons movie Honor Among Thieves underperformed at the box office, the franchise is making a major push into television with two separate high-profile streaming series in development.
According to Screen Rant, HBO is developing a Baldur's Gate 3 series with Craig Mazin attached as showrunner. Mazin is best known for creating HBO's The Last of Us, which became one of the most acclaimed video game adaptations ever made. The Baldur's Gate 3 video game, released in 2023, is set in the Forgotten Realms universe of Dungeons and Dragons and is widely considered one of the most successful video games ever made.
Mazin is not approaching this project as an outsider. He has been a Dungeon Master for 15 years and has logged over 1,000 hours playing Baldur's Gate 3 himself, according to Deadline. The HBO series will reportedly be set immediately after the events of the game, giving Mazin room to take the story in a new direction while still remaining grounded in the source material.
Meanwhile, Deadpool and Wolverine director Shawn Levy is working on a separate Dungeons and Dragons series for Netflix titled The Forgotten Realms. Levy has an existing relationship with Netflix, having previously produced Stranger Things, the show that helped bring Dungeons and Dragons back into mainstream pop culture beginning in 2016.
The 2023 film Honor Among Thieves had a budget of 150 million dollars and earned around 208 million dollars globally. While the reviews were largely positive, the box office performance was considered a disappointment for a wide theatrical release, and a sequel was not pursued. The pivot to television follows a pattern seen with other fantasy franchises. Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Castlevania, and The Legend of Vox Machina all found their largest audiences on the small screen rather than in cinemas.
Free RPG Day, arriving this Saturday June 27, offers tabletop fans a chance to explore the broader world of roleplaying games that Dungeons and Dragons helped popularize. Now in its 19th year, the annual event provides free copies of games to participating retailers, with a limit of one per customer. This year's slate includes 40 titles, among them The Cosmere RPG: Law and Obligation, based on Brandon Sanderson's fantasy novels. The event traces its roots to Free Comic Book Day and has grown steadily since its 2007 launch under its current coordinator, Gaming Days.
