We’ve got some new information to share with you regarding the Dungeons & Dragons movie that is being developed by writers and directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. Thanks to a recently released press release from Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast division we know the setting of the film
The movie will be set in The Forgotten Realms, which was created in 1967 as a setting for short stories by Ed Greenwood. It has since become one of the most enduring campaign settings for D&D. The primary focus of the setting is the continent of Faerûn, which is part of the world of Abeir-Toril, an Earth-like planet with certain obvious influences and similarities from the real world and fantasy fiction.
Here’s a description of the land of Faerûn:
From the bitter, windswept steppes of the Endless Waste to the storm-lashed cliffs of the Sword Coast stretches a wide, wild land of shining kingdoms and primal wilderness, Faerûn is only one continent of the world known as Toril. Other lands lie in distant corners of the world, but Faerun is the center of it all, the crossroads and crux upon which all else turns. Dozens of nations, hundreds of citystates, and countless tribes, villages, and settlements dot its expanse.
The continent of Faerûn is a landmass of approximately nine and a half million square miles, located mainly in the northern hemisphere of the world of Toril. Sub-arctic extremes chill its northern reaches, where ice sheets like the Great Glacier dominate the landscape in blinding white. To the south are the equatorial jungles of Chult and the tropical coasts of Halruaa. It’s bordered on the west by the Trackless Sea and on the east by the Endless Wastes and the Hordelands that separate it from Kara-Tur.
Faerûn is an open land full of kingdoms and empires, large and small, and scattered city-states and villages struggling to make their way in a landscape that can be unforgiving wilderness one mile and cosmopolitan city the next.
Countless millions of humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, and other sentient beings call Faerûn home. It is a land of magic and intrigue, cruel violence and divine compassion, where gods have ascended and died, and millennia of warfare and conquests have shaped dozens of unique cultures.
The film stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Justice Smith, Hugh Grant, and Sophia Lillis. There has been a synopsis for the film going around on social media, but that synopsis has been confirmed to be false, so I’m not going to post it here.
When previously 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.”
While we now know the setting for the film, there are a ton of different directions that the story can go. We’ll just have to wait and see what that story will be.
Dungeons & Dragons will be released on March 3, 2023.