The idea of a Dungeons & Dragons movie is a hard one to swallow for anyone familiar with the beloved tabletop roleplaying game. D&D isn’t so much a story as it is a rough outline for stories–a pile of monsters, some general settings, information about playable species, and what sorts of classes you can make your character. There’s no story to adapt the same way that you could adapt a novel or narrative video game. It would be like adapting Gran Turismo or Tetris. Oh. Wait.
Along with the lack of any story specifics to speak of is the property’s history of poor adaptations like 2000’s Dungeons & Dragons, which has a 10% critic’s score on Rotten Tomatoes, with the audience response only slightly better at 20% after more than 25,000 ratings. Other D&D-related movies don’t fare any better, and the only ones that really fare well with D&D fans, in particular, are fan films like The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.