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Comment by mepian | Hacker News Reader

I think this is my favourite fantasy movie since... the Lord of the Rings trilogy, really. Apparently it didn't do very well at the box office, and it feels rather unfair.

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I was expecting it to be terrible for some reason, and so was everyone else I've talked to about it, so I'm not surprised it did badly at the box office. It turns out it was an incredible film in every way, and a great experience to watch. I hope it makes a good return in the long run.

Well if you're familiar with other D&D movies your expectations would be quite well founded. This was an awesome film that used enough D&D to make things fantastical without being caught up in too many specifics - prior movies have not walked that line very well.

I, too, am hopeful for some continuations along the same vein - but as always a successful thing in media tends to attract the attention of studios and other unhelpful folks that meddle too much in sequels.

I saw it on an airplane. It was technically OK, but not really LOTR level, mainly because of its story being somewhat of a comedy. It was basically a marvel superhero film with misfit D&D adventures, and I’m a bit tired of the formula.

The formula was familiar, but I thought the writing was quality enough that it didn’t feel as forced or as cringeworthy as a lot of recent Marvel media. The humor somehow fit the fantasy conceits well, and the meta conventions of a D&D campaign (DM-controlled NPC paragon, characters misusing overpowered artifacts, etc.). Felt like they nailed the execution with this one.

One of the things I really appreciated about this movie, which felt different from blockbuster superhero movies, was how they handled visual spectacle. There was a great deal of it, but it never felt chaotic or cacophonous. For example the scene where the druid has to escape the castle while being pelted with arrows. It felt very easy to follow everything happening on screen, which made the action feel tasteful, fluid, and more like art than noise. I certainly wasn't expecting that.

I liked the movie a lot. It felt like a fresh, original entry in the genre of comedy fantasy, next to beloved entries like The Princess Bride, Ladyhawk, A Knight's Tale, and Shrek. It was well-written and directed, even if some of the action sequences (e.g. the dragon cave) were a bit tropey.

They should have called it something else. There's clearly a market for fantasy, as has been seen with the popularity of Netflix's Witcher series (which treads very similar ground), but the Dungeons and Dragons brand has been thoroughly devalued over the years, and doesn't have the same kind of mass-market appeal.

The studio released it around the same time as the Super Mario movie, which resulted in an utter slaughter.

> it didn't do very well at the box office, and it feels rather unfair.

I think it might be because of the OGL scandal (when WotC tried to use a loophole in the license text to turn an open license into a closed one).

At least that was my personal reason why I decided not to watch that movie, and not to buy anything from WotC anymore.

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