A team has been gathered for the new Dungeons & Dragons movie.
The hugely successful role-playing game was previously brought to the big screen in 2000 in a critically panned fantasy film starring Jeremy Irons.
Having been in development for a fair amount of time, it seems that the new project is gaining steam again having brought Chris McKay into discussions to direct.
McKay is best-known for directing The Lego Batman movie. He also directed numerous episodes of Robot Chicken and has been announced as the helmer for Warner Bros/DC flick Nightwing. He produced Lego Ninjago and is an exec producer on the sequel to The Lego Movie, which is currently in production.
The movie will be one of the first under Paramount’s new AllSpark Pictures banner, which hopes to rival Marvel Studios. Michael Gilio is penning the script while Brian Goldner and Stephen Davis of Hasbro (which acquired D&D owners Wizards Of The Coast in 1999) are producing.
The film has been in development for some time but the lawsuit between Sweetpea Entertainment and Hasbro about ownership of sequel rights delayed progress. Once the settlement was finalised in 2015, Hasbro moved the project from Warner Bros. to Paramount and eventually to AllSpark after announcing the new studio.
Hasbro and Paramount are also collaborating on Transformers, a franchise which they intend to ‘reset’, according to a recent report.
Dungeons & Dragons is slated for release on July 23, 2021.