http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/sweetpea-aims-stop-universals-dungeons-624475
Thoughts?
It's impossible to tell without seeing the actual contracts.
Honestly I'd prefer them focusing on campaign settings and novels to get movies from. A "Dungeons and Dragons" movie is a bit silly, to me. It's just general fantasy with a name tacked on.
And all of the movies have been bad. In my opinion. So, let's get on a Drizzt movie or serial series.
CelticPaladin wrote:
The_Jester wrote:
This also show how bad hasbro has handled the dnd licsense in the first place. The dnd movies are all bad not just the live action but the animated dragonlance one was terrible also. Maybe if they stopped letting hacks and budget companys use the dnd ip and actually let some let some talented people make some movies and a tv series, we might see the brand grow(as opposed to the running joke it is to nonplayers).
To be fair to Hasbro, they didn't exactly have much power to stop or influence those movies. TSR sold the rights back in 1994. Sweetpea was built off of those rights, fair and square. Sure, they made terrible movies, but that was within their rights. Hasbro is playing hardball and taking advantage of the fact that no theaters were willing to sell tickets for the second movie. As a consequence they're trying to get a judge to rule that the second movie was therefore technically a TV production. By changing "Wrath of the Dragon God" into a TV movie, Sweetpea's rights for the movie will have retroactively expired in 2008, so their renewal of the rights with Warner Bros movie will be anulled. All so that the movie rights return to whoever holds the rights of the D&D table-top game: Hasbro.
I hope Hasbro & Sweetpea can fight it out for decades.
That way, no matter who eventually wins, we'll all have been spared more awefull movies sporting the D&D logo for a good long while.
Meanwhile? I'm sure plenty of decent or better fantasy movies will have come & gone....
Better bad agreement that good setence.
Maybe Hasbro could offer other IP for movie, for example a settin from d20 Future (Star*Drive or Star*Frontier).
CelticPaladin wrote:
Lord, I hope they succeed in reclaiming the IP. Then I hope they pass it on to someone DECENT at making films. Just look at the resurgence of popularity in superheroes since Spider-Man, in fantasy since Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings - a good movie can revitalise a genre. I long for a good D&D movie. I'm not sure entirely what that looks like, but I know I haven't seen it yet.
First of all - allow me to assure you that I am a long in the tooth grognard (hopefuly with none of the negative aspects of such) and love fantasy RP, so much so in fact I would have gone back in time to destroy the paper MMO 4th Edition turned out to be, and the decisions responsible for numbers bloat in previous editions... however...
I guess this is my way of saying I love the hobby and feel justified and qualified in pointing out its persistent flaws with regarrds to this debate, and of course to ask you not to judge me as a hater of some kind.
Because I am going to be blunt...
The D&D movies HAVE indeed been embarassing to watch. But then the kind of drama that gets played out in Game of Thrones and isn't in any of the movies, is also rarely done so at the gaming table.
The movies were therefore, and to a significant degree, products of their source, albeit far too cheaply or cheesily done even for that!
Moreover, the various novels, of which a certain Drow renegade figure highly can be very pulpy too. However, I like Driz', and think if well adapted, it could make a great saga. Ensure Drow society doesn't look like a cheesy goth vamp convention and you would be off to a good start. There is plenty of angst, horror and despotic despair to focus on with the Drow - no need to make them look like a nasty version of the Adams Family as artwork so often seems to focus on.
What the IP desperately needs is a well acted, character driven story with real human interest, into which all the glories of the genre can be shown off as something other than a version of a nerdy gaming niche.
The hobby needs to throw off this persistent image. I run a game where the particpants are a smallhold farmer, a retired ex-special forces soldier, a database administrator, a theatre actor and I am an environmentalist who works for the government. Our ages range from mid twenties to mid forties and we have all grown up with RP - one or two of us from when it was printed on poor quality paper pamphlets and you had to fill in the pressed numbers on your easily chipped plastic dice with wax crayon...
WE have matured since our early formative years, and yet our hobby sometimes feels like it keeps itself in a perpetual state of 'teenagedom' - constantly engaged in reiterating itself with myriad alternate forms of crunch. There is never more than a page or two in the odd rulebook or the odd supplemental book which manages to do anything more than repeat the same advice about 'how to roleplay'. Nothing really stands out as dedicated to the method acting that makes roleplay sessions truly immersive and dramatic. Players and GM's have to come to that themselves, and many never really manage it.
Thus piles of crunch have built up, and slowed the narrative flow of games down to greater and greater degrees, making immersion more and more difficult to maintain.
One only has to look at these forums to see that the vast majority of debate is about crunch and not flavour or experience.
It's a shame, because at it's best, RP blows 'murder mysteries or other 'mature' games out of the water. But mention RP even at such an event, and people think what they are doing is the high of maturity by comparison.
WE have kept the game grounded in the gaming elements and are judged on that basis. The movies have followed that trend and are really rather bad as a result.
I sincerely hope a good director gets hold of this (whenever the wrangle is over) and makes something better out of it - it will help the hobby no end. Even having a good movie to refer to as shorthand when explaining to non-players what the game is about would be a sea change level of improvement.
Damn the 'Goblins of Kurtle', or unecessary lore-accurate references to whether a hero is in one class level bracket or another (what the hell did that really add to the narrative of the third movie in that lame magic shop conversation??) - I want to see more moments like the 'Ride of the Rohirrim'.
Fantasy is great when it's well done!
What we need is a great fantasy movie set in a D&D world, not a D&D game masquerading as a movie!!!
I think the fact that they were probably products of their source highlights a mistake on the part of the film makers rather than the source. A pack of dudes around a table making it up as they go along is not going to make good cinema. It's like how MST3K would actually come up with their snark over the course of 3 to 5 viewings of a bad movie and they'd write stuff down, edit it and put it through all the normal rigours of publication before they sat down and made fun of that bad movie for an audience.
A D&D film needs to not reflect a bunch of dudes making it up on the spot. Or it needs to highlight it in a way that makes it obvious and keeps tongue firmly in cheek, but that's harder to do.
Like if you look at what makes the various D&D games like nwn1 and Baldur's Gate so successful, ultimately you have to say it's the quality of the writing. Or you can look at the SSI games like Pool of Radiance, which is also well written but it's really that the puzzles are very well thought out and interesting to unravel.
Point is, they're games first and D&D second. A movie needs to be a good movie first and D&D second.
Hopefully this maneuver will produce good movies. It's not like Sweetpea's managed to win over an adoring fanbase or anything so I can't say I'm gonna get too mad if they lose it. I don't want Hasbro to have it either but given the choice between airplane food I'm not sure I'll like and hospital food I know I hate, I'll take the airplane food.
kedcoleman wrote:
Actually, if the next D&D movie is about as action oriented and mildly pulpy as the latest Hansel and Gretel movie about the sibling witch hunters, then it would be a step up I think. Really, the problem is that D&D has a lot of expected nerd baggage that it has to slip in that really kills the mood. 2011's offering of Your Highness was practically a D&D movie in all but the name and maybe some themed monsters.
D&D really just needs to stay off the silver screen. A cartoon and/or live-action TV show would be a much better medium to tell a D&D story in.
I've written at length about the possibility for a good D&D movie and am hopeful we can get some people with talent involved and get a good movie.
Given the amount if potential profit a big studio could recieve for the movie versus the small productin Sweatpea could muster it's in Hasbro's interests to sue away.
CelticPaladin wrote:
Dwarfslayer wrote:
Dwarfslayer wrote:
To me good news about a D&D movie might be if it were set in Darksun or maybe Eberron and/or was directed by Joss Whedon and had Van Diesel in it. Now that is a line up I could see working.
MechaPilot wrote:
DavidArgall wrote:
MechaPilot wrote:
DavidArgall wrote:
Molecule wrote:
There's only one guide you need to follow to make a good D&D movie.
Hawk The Slayer.
Case closed.
DavidArgall wrote:
Darkwolf_Bloodsbane wrote:
Cable TV. The idea behind allowing a monolopoly is that having only one company responsible for maintaining lines keeps such lines orderly. Rather than having every company that provides cable TV to lay their own lines, the state limits it to one company in an area, which is responsible for upkeep of its own lines and system. In states that have deregulated power, there's still a single company that maintains lines and delivers the power to consumers. These are two examples of times when the state has determined that a monopoly is in the best interest of the consumer/community.
Copyright isn't at the expense of others. Copyright belongs to the creator. The work didn't exist until the creator created it. There is no expense; it's a wholly new thing that did not exist before. What copyright does is allow the creator the exclusive right to profit from his creation. I believe that's a good thing. Shakespeare did great without copyright, sure. But Shakespeare didn't live in the modern world. Shakespeare didn't have an Internet full of people just waiting to record his his plays at the Globe so they could post them online for people to see without paying. Gutenberg came up with a way to print things quickly, but his press was a far cry from the types of printing presses you see in professional publishers now, and especially from the PDF and various e-book formats that make perfect copies nearly instantly.
I would like to see a new company take the reins of the D&D franchise. As much as I adore the first and second movies, it's not because they're good movies. I'm anxious to see how this plays out. If Sweetpea does indeed have rights in perpetuity, then Hasbro has no case. But, if their retaining of the rights is based on creating films, and that those films must play in theaters, then I think Hasbro should pull those rights and give them to someone else that can afford to hire decent writers.
Like I said, I enjoyed watching Jeremy Irons chew up sets in the first movie, and the second movie was a pretty decent D&D adventure. But there's no excuse for Book of Vile Darkness. I'd like to see someone else's take on the franchise now.
Chinese law allows break the copyrifht if products are made in their land. A good example the Chinese fakes of Harry Potter books.
Without copyright the companies couldn´t recover the money was spent for R&D (Reseach and development). We aren´t talking about the mockbusters by The Asylum Productions. Do you rebember the 1902 silent French movie "A Trip to the Moon"? (From wikipedia
Its director, George Méliès had intended to release the film in the United States for profit, but he was never going to see a penny from the film's distribution. Agents of Thomas Edison had seen the film in London. They bribed the theater owner, took the film into a lab and made copies for Edison. The film was a sensation in America and a fortune was made off its exhibition. None of it went to George Méliès who eventually went bankrupt as a result.
Without copyright most of new singers and group music couldn´t broad a second disck because people only would buy it from the "Top manta" (Spanish expresion for selling of pirate copies in the streets. The illegal copies are on a blancket, if police appear the seller, usually inmigrants, get the blancket fastly and run away). Think about bankrupt videogames companies because gamers only downloaded pirate copies. Even there is a comic strip by Dork Tower about Warhammster about it (the game production was cancelled, and the other charactes said they had downloaed and photocopied the games instead to buy the original game).
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The logo of D&D is Hasbro Copyright. I guess a sequel, with characters of previous movies could be possible, but without the D&D TM. Don´t forget Bioware left Newerwinter Nights and created its own IP, Dragon Age.
The most important is a good work, "Batman & Robin" or "Batman: the Dark Knight" are good exaples, a known name isn´t enought.
Copyright, at least in the USA, has gradualy expanded from "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.", which was initially 14 or 28 years, to life of author + 70 years.
All you need to know about US copyright law, is that it's extended about twenty years every time the copyright for Steamboat Willie is about to expire.
You guys should watch the new Riddick movie, it's like a D&D movie, but in space.
thewok wrote:
Here is the Court document (including original irrevocable license agreement) of Sweatpea Entertainment vs Hasbro/WotC over D&D film
DavidArgall wrote:
I read through quite a bit of the suit/counter suit material and it has made me decide 100% without a doubt that I will from this day forward 100% boycott Sweetpea Entertainment. This is no great loss. None of their work was any good anyways, IMO.
TheLyons wrote:
Luis_Carlos wrote:
I recall many years ago (about the time Xena and Hercules went off the air - late '90s?) it was announced that a New Zeland production company was seeking the option to make a Drizz't TV series to replace them. Unfortunately, nothing ever came of that....
Carl
There was a project to create a TV serie of "Urban Arcana", the settin of 20 Modern.
Luis_Carlos wrote:
thewok wrote:
MechaPilot wrote:
TheLyons wrote:
Howdy folks,
I have moved this thread to the Off-Topic Tavern where it is more on topic.
Thanks.