Dungeons and Dragons

Chris McKay, original director of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, explains why he parted ways with the movie despite being a big DnD fan.

And the fact that [there are] like Beholders and things like that they put in the movie, and bugbears and owlbears, that was kind of what we did. So to be able to do something in that world, but also try to tell it through a modern lens, and try to do it through a heist, like it’s this heist team going in, and then the specialist who can do this stuff, and supposed to do that, and that kind of thing, that, to me, was a lot of fun, to just imagine what that would have been and how you can shoot that in a fun, kinetic way. I think, from what I understand—I’ve still not seen the finished movie because I’ve been working on Renfield—but I hear [there are] a lot of the scenes that Mike and I worked on and then Mike wrote that are in the movie or at least some versions of them. I was approached to direct that movie, and I started developing it, and what we were developing—Mike Gilio and I, the writer I was working with—we were sort of developing a heist movie. And so that was kind of the way that we went about it, and we developed a treatment that the studio liked, and Mike went off and wrote a really great script. He shared his excitement for the latest Dungeons & Dragons adaptation as a long-time fan of the games but ultimately had to part ways with the project as he turned his attention to making his live-action directorial debut with the Chris Pratt-led Tomorrow War.