The DUNGEONS & DRAGONS TV Series Will Tell an Intimate Story, Compares to JAWS and FIRST BLOOD
Not only are we getting a Dungeons & Dragons movie, but there’s also a TV series in development based on the popular epic fantasy series. That series is being written by John Wick franchise writer Derek Kolstad, and according to him, the series is going to tell a more intimate story. He explains that it will deal with “a tinier sliver of that world.”
During a recent interview with Collider, Kolstad explained his plans for the show and compared the storytelling style of it to Rambo: First Blood and Jaws.
“In the first Star Wars, you heard about Jabba the Hutt and you don’t see him until the third one because you earn at that point, and whatever the budget was for the third one compared to the first one, who cares, right? And I think in Dungeons and Dragons, who has this massive, dedicated community of acolytes, I don’t want to suddenly throw everything on screen and say, ‘Here’s the buffet.’ You’d much rather keep the story intimate. When you think of our favorite movies, I’d rather do the First Blood version. It’s a guy in the woods being hunted. And it’s very small, but you allude to the other things through conversation. You have your USS Indianapolis [in Jaws], you see something in the background. You hear a name that 3% of the audience is like, ‘Ho ho, I think we’re going to see him soon.’ I think the thing is just to take a deep breath, to go into it slowly, and to just respect the world, and as you adapt, certain things need to change. But you better not touch the heart and soul of why people love this thing.”
Kolstad went on to say that he doesn’t “want to go in the middle of the mythos. I want to come near the end where everything is canonical, it’s biblical, it’s happened. Or, it’s about to happen. That way you can revisit certain sequences and storylines that everyone loved in the past through flashback, but where we go is new. The unique yet familiar of it all is why we return to the games we love.”
The world of D&D is so big, there are so many different directions that the story can go. I like the fact that eOne and Paramount are stretching it across multiple platforms so that they can tell different stories from different sections of the universe with different characters.
I’ve been having a blast playing D&D over the past year. In my experience, sometimes less is more, so I like the direction that Kolstad is taking with the series.