Hugh Grant (The Undoing) and Sophia Lillis (IT) are the latest actors to join the cast of Paramount and Hasbro’s eOne feature film adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons. They will join the previously cast Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, and Justice Smith.
There’s no word on who Lillis will be playing, but according to the report, Grant will be playing the villain of the story. It’ll be fun to see him star in an epic fantasy movie like this. I don’t recall seeing him ever do anything like this before.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (Game Night) are set to direct the movie, which is based on the popular fantasy role-playing game. Goldstein and Daley also wrote the script which was based on a previous draft by Michael Gilio.
We still don’t have any confirmed story details to reveal, but it was previously reported that it might focus on “a group of adventurers looking for the Eye of Vecna, a powerful artifact that dates back to the earliest days of the game. Vecna is a powerful lich turned god whose hand and eye (remnants from when Vecna was a mortal) grant unspeakable power. Both the Hand and Eye of Vecna come with a terrible cost – in order to use either artifact, the user must remove their existing eye or hand and then replace it with the artifact.”
When talking about the tone of the film, Goldstein explained, “We want it to be fun. It’s not an out and out comedy, but it is an action-fantasy movie with a lot of comedic elements and characters we hope people will really get into and enjoy watching their adventures.”
Daley also talked about finding a format for the film and how they never went into the project wanting to spoof D&D, “D&D is such a unique look at the fantasy genre where it is contemporary in terms of the people playing it and the way they speak to each other. So we never wanted to spoof the genre of fantasy or take the piss out of it. But we did want to find another way into it that we hadn’t necessarily seen before. Just the format of Dungeons & Dragons is so interesting and fun and all about critical thinking and thinking on your feet and figuring out ways to make things work after they fall flat. There’s a lot of the spirit of that that we’re trying to inject into the movie itself.”
Hasbro/eOne and Paramount are jointly producing and financing the film. Jeremy Latcham is producing through his deal with eOne, Hasbro’s entertainment arm. Hasbro’s Brian Goldner is also producing.
Source: Deadline