The Dungeons & Dragons Movie is the Blueprint for HBO’s Baldur’s Gate

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With the huge popularity of Dungeons & Dragons and video game adaptations, it was inevitable that a D&D video game would become a live-action series. HBO has announced they’re developing a series based on the 2023 game, with Craig Mazin – known for Chernobyl and The Last of Us – leading the project. The game, part of the Baldur’s Gate franchise, is set in the Forgotten Realms, which is the main setting for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game.

The Forgotten Realms were intentionally created as a fairly standard fantasy world, taking inspiration from popular stories like The Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian. This approach is ideal for a game where players can experience classic fantasy adventures, but it makes it harder to create adaptations that truly feel like Dungeons & Dragons. To best capture the spirit of D&D, it’s important to focus on how the game is played, and the 2023 movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves provides a great example of how to do just that.

Honor Among Thieves is the Greatest Adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons

The film earned $200 million with a $150 million production budget, but when marketing expenses are included, it probably didn’t make a profit. Despite this, critics and audiences loved it – it received a 91% rating from critics and a 92% rating from viewers on Rotten Tomatoes, and it even won a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

A big reason fans loved Honor Among Thieves is that it genuinely captured the feeling of playing a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The movie didn’t remind you it was all just a game, but it was easy to picture how it would unfold behind the scenes, like a real game master was at work. Characters experienced both amazing and awful luck, just like when rolling dice. A perfect example is when one character spent the entire first fight struggling to cut through the ropes binding him – a bit of comical misfortune common in D&D.

Sometimes, the Dungeon Master subtly intervened to help the group. For example, when the party accidentally destroyed a bridge and couldn’t find a way across, the sorcerer Simon Aumar suddenly realized that Marlamin’s walking stick had a hidden ability. This might seem like a convenient coincidence in other stories, but it’s a common occurrence in Dungeons & Dragons when players are stuck and the Dungeon Master offers a helpful solution.

The movie Honor Among Thieves cleverly included little details, like the somewhat restrictive rules for shapeshifting, which a character even pointed out as feeling artificial. These nods to the Dungeons & Dragons game were a fun treat for dedicated fans, but didn’t confuse or exclude viewers who weren’t familiar with the game.

The Baldur’s Gate Series Needs to Acknowledge Its Source Material

The upcoming Baldur’s Gate series won’t feel quite like Honor Among Thieves. While Baldur’s Gate III had humor, it wasn’t primarily a comedy like the movie. That said, the series could still borrow some of the same successful comedic elements. Historically, adapting games into other formats has proven difficult.

The previous Dungeons & Dragons movie was poorly received, and despite the quality of Honor Among Thieves, it didn’t make enough money to justify a follow-up. Surprisingly, the most popular D&D adaptations are the Prime Video series The Legend of Vox Machina and The Mighty Nein, which intentionally avoided directly using D&D rules to avoid legal issues. Baldur’s Gate has a chance to change this pattern of failure, but to succeed, it should learn from what has worked well in the past.

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2026-02-13 03:13