The last movie about Dungeons & Dragons was a flop at the box office. Hugh Grant, who played a role in it, believes that there is simply no interest in it. Maybe the result would have been different if the movie had been released a few months later.
Dungeons & Dragons has been around since 1974. At that time, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson invented the role-playing game, which remains very popular to this day. Besides the games, there have been repeated attempts to bring the D&D universe to the big screen.
What movies are there about D&D? In 2000, there was a first attempt released under the simple title Dungeons and Dragons. The film was an artistic failure and is considered by Empire to be one of the worst of all time. Nevertheless, sequels followed in 2005 and 2012, which were no better.
Only in 2023 did Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves release a film that took the universe seriously and had notable actors. Among the main roles were Michelle Rodriguez and Chris Pine, who, by the way, believes that D&D should be taught in schools.
The result was a faithful adaptation of the source material, which was rewarded with 91% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience rated it 93%.
Unfortunately, the film was still not a commercial success. Hugh Grant, who has a supporting role in the film, believes he knows the reason for this.
A film that nobody wants to see?
What does Hugh Grant think? With a budget of around 150 million USD, the film would have needed to gross at least double that to be considered a success. In the end, according to boxofficemojo.com, it only grossed 208 million USD at the box office.
Hugh Grant stated in a conversation with Variety that he really likes the film. But he sees a fundamental problem:
This is the biggest mystery to me – why didn’t anyone conduct market research beforehand? I think that’s where it went wrong: Essentially, people just thought: I don’t want to see a movie about this game. Why didn’t anyone ask the public?
Hugh Grant via Vanity Fair
In his opinion, the low box office results simply stem from too few people being interested in a film adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons. He might not be wrong about that.
D&D is, despite its great popularity within the community, not a topic that has reached the mainstream so far. Hollywood and such blockbusters, however, rely on that mainstream. However, things might have looked different if the release had been postponed by four months.
What happened four months later? In short: Baldur’s Gate 3 was released and became a great success. Suddenly, D&D was on everyone’s lips, even among those who usually had little to do with gaming or the pen & paper template.
So it could be that the film Honor Among Thieves would have benefitted from the popularity of the game. Unfortunately, the timing was not quite right at this point. The film flopped, making a timely sequel unlikely. Yet it was really good – you can find a detailed opinion on this on MeinMMO.
