After several years of shutdown owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, San Diego Comic-Con was finally back in full swing this year, welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd of dedicated genre fans. Kicking off a full day of Hall H presentations on Thursday, July 21, was a debut look at the big screen fantasy action-adventure comedy Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, releasing March 3, 2023, from Paramount Pictures.

Based, of course, on the enduring tabletop role-playing game, the film adaptation, from Game Night co-writer-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, seeks entry into the crowded fantasy entertainment realm as a potential “plug-and-play” franchise, owing to its broad-ranging name recognition and appeal across multiple generations.

Following a brief technical glitch, panel moderator Karl Jacobs introduced a short behind-the-scenes featurette which gave Comic-Con attendees the very first glimpse at the adventure, about a ragtag band of misfits going on a quest for a relic, trying to make things right after having “stolen the wrong thing for the wrong person.”

Filmmakers Goldstein and Daley and producer Jeremy Latcham then took the stage, good-naturedly chronicling some of the two-and-a-half years they’ve spent together on the project, but mostly sharing their affinity for the property in its original form.

“Both of us have a long history with D&D, we should start there,” said Goldstein. “I played as a kid, the first edition. I played with my older brother, who was the dungeon master, and he would always kill me off in the first half-hour — whatever I did, I ended up in a gelatinous cube. There was no saving me. And now my 10-year-old son plays every day.”

“I’ve been an avid player since I was 14, when I was an actor on the show Freaks & Geeks,” added Daley. “My character was a geek, and a huge fan of Dungeons and Dragons. I had known peripherally about it so I decided, being the young method actor that I was, to play a campaign with the fellow cast members.

“And immediately I fell in love with the world, because as anyone who’s played Dungeons and Dragons knows, it’s not just a game, it’s really the feeling you get when you play the game. And that’s what we tried to do here with this film — (show) that sense of camaraderie, family, coming together as a group, facing obstacles where you don’t know what to expect.

“That is what we wanted to capture — and of course, that very unique brand of humor that I think sets us apart from anything else in the fantasy space.”

Next, the trio were joined onstage by some of their Dungeons & Dragons cast: star Chris Pine, who portrays Elgin, a Bard; Regé-Jean Page, who portrays Xenk, a Paladin; Sophia Lillis, who plays Druid Doric; and Hugh Grant, who portrays Forge Fletcher, a Rogue.

Of this group, Michelle Rodriguez, who portrays Barbarian Holga, won the informal prize for most show-stopping entrance, besting Pine’s posed martial arts kick with a full-speed tumble-and-roll which drew a big crowd response.

 

As the cast shared some of their firsthand knowledge and experiences (“You don’t grow up in New Jersey without playing D&D,” said Rodriguez, to much laughter), Pine admitted he wasn’t a Dungeons & Dragons fan growing up. But the actor said that his nephew, now 13, is “a huge player, writing his own campaigns, playing every week.”

After he talked to Goldstein and Daley about possibly doing the movie, they sent over a gift package of all things Dungeons & Dragons, and Pine called his nephew to join him for the unboxing.

“To see his eyes when this whole treasure chest opened just go from big to bigger, I knew something was up,” said Pine. “So then we decided to get my whole family together to play, with him as Dungeon Master, and it was an amazing thing to see all of my family light up in that particular way.

“I hadn’t seen that happen in my family in years. My father didn’t really want to play, and my sister thought it was kind of a pain, but then it slowly snowballed, and everybody got super-stoked on it and really excited, and then three hours in, had completely forgotten that (earlier resistance).”

After showing an engaging maze chase sequence for the movie, which was shot in Northern Ireland in 2021 during the United Kingdom’s COVID shutdown, Daley and Goldstein talked about being inspired by the animatronics of films from their childhoods like The Never-Ending Story, and wanting to blend real, practical, on-set FX with CGI augmentation in Dungeons & Dragons.

For the cast, that meant staying active. “Lots of working out, lots of protein shakes, lots of gas,” said Rodriguez with a laugh when asked about playing a Barbarian.

“Lots of push-ups, lots of sit-ups, lots of lifting weights. During COVID, you could have lots of frustration, so I got Jeremy to hook me up with a punching bag, and that helped a lot with the stressful days. But I had a blast training — I gained a good 10 pounds of muscle for it, and it was fun.”

Added Page: “I got to swing a sword around for a living, and that’s just everything you’d ever want growing up and coming into this business. I got really, really good with the sword, and there was lots of stunt training, so my thighs were killing me but I had the best ass of life.”

 

 

Grant, a droll presence throughout the panel, joked about having a notoriously negative view of all screenplays he’s sent, but finding this script funny, and possessing “a bit of a Monty Python vibe to it.”

Pine, too, talked about the tonal balance for which they were aiming with the movie. “I guess I always call it a Spielberg-ian energy,” he said. “The films that I grew up with in the ’80s all felt open and light and buoyant. And your job (as an actor), like good improv, is just to keep the energy and music of the scene alive. I really like that kind of filmmaking.”

Affirming this commitment to character-based interplay to go along with sword-and-sorcery action was a graveyard scene the cast and crew shared, in which a conjuring spell to reanimate corpses and ask them five (and only five) questions gives way to some comedically exasperating results.

Wrapping up, a half-dozen audience queries yielded anecdotes about prop keepsakes both actual and wishful (coins, and, for Lillis, her character’s magnetic horns); no small amount of dancing around specifics of Easter eggs and particular monsters and creatures featured in the movie; plus an amusing Horse & Hounds callback directed at Grant.

Closing the panel was the world premiere of the full proper trailer for the film. Partially set to the rollicking, back-and-forth guitar licks of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” it features a well-placed stinger that will surely leave a smile on the face of Pine’s nephew.