With the Game of Thrones spin-off show due to start shooting soon and Amazon's Lord of the Rings series in pre-production, fantasy TV and cinema remains big business. One project that has been in development for several years is a movie based on the classic fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. It has now been reported that Game Night's Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley are in line to direct the D&D movie.
According to Deadline, Goldstein and Daley are in negotiations for the job. They will replace The Lego Movie's Chris McKay, who has been attached since February 2018, but will now make the Chris Pratt sci-fi thriller Ghost Draft. Goldstein and Daley also wrote the screenplay to the Marvel hit Spider-Man: Homecoming and were two of the many directors attached to DC's Flash movie before exiting that much-delayed project.
The Dungeons & Dragons reboot currently has a release date of November 21, 2021, although given the early stage of development, this could easily change. An earlier Dungeons & Dragons movie was released in 2001, but it was a commercial failure and poorly received by critics.
As for the Lord of the Rings series, Amazon recently revealed its production team. It includes Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom director J.A. Bayona, who will helm the first two episodes, and a writing team that includes writers from shows such as Breaking Bad, Hannibal, Stranger Things, and Game of Thrones. Although a release date has not been announced yet, we know that the show is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's trilogy of books and Peter Jackson's movie adaptations.