Just last month it was announced that Chris Pine will star in a live-action Dungeons & Dragons film. But there’s more live-action D&D on the way: The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that John Wick writer and creator Derek Kolstad has been hired to develop a D&D television series.
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The D&D movie is expected to start filming this year, and is likely to be the start of a whole-ass D&D Cinematic Universe, as the studio is reportedly also working with other writers to develop more projects in the fantastical RPG universe. The timing is apt—even before the pandemic, the nearly 50-year-old game was enjoying a surge in popularity brought on in part by celebrity players, RPG-themed podcasts and books and series (think Critical Role and The Adventure Zone), livestreamed games, and the general demystification of the game itself. “Technology has helped demystify the game by showing that you don’t need to be a rules expert to have a good time,” as D&D principal story designer Chris Perkins told USA Today last year.
Derek Kolstad is the creator of John Wick; the series began as a spec script titled Scorn. He wrote or co-wrote the second and third films in the John Wick series, and his profile has only continued to rise since then. Kolstad created the Quibi show Die Hart, is a writer on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, has two other screenplays in pre-production, and is attached to the TV adaptation of the video game Hitman (though there hasn’t been much news about this since an initial announcement in 2017).
We anxiously await further word on what will obviously have to be a very action-centric D&D series.
