Chris Pine in Talks to Star in Dungeons & Dragons Movie: Reports

Chris Pine might do a Dungeons & Dragons movie. The Star Trek and Wonder Woman 1984 star is reportedly in talks to be a part of a big-budget adaptation of the fantasy role-playing game. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who directed the 2018 action-comedy film Game Night starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, are writing and directing Dungeons & Dragons. Paramount Pictures and Hasbro-owned eOne — Hasbro is the rights holder for Dungeons & Dragons — are producing the film, with the latter distributing it in the UK and Canada, and the former doing so everywhere else.

Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter brought word of Pine’s potential involvement in Dungeons & Dragons, which has been in the works for a while now. It was originally at Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema, with Ansel Elgort set to star, but it ended up in a legal hassle over ownership rights. Dungeons & Dragons then ended up at Paramount, first with The Lego Batman Movie director Chris McKay, before the studio brought in Goldstein and Daley as replacements following their script work on Spider-Man: Homecoming. It now seems to be moving forward.

This isn’t the first movie adaptation of Dungeons & Dragons. Justin Whalin, Marlon Wayans, and Jeremy Irons were involved with Dungeons & Dragons (2000), which turned out to be a critical and commercial dud. Two sequels followed nonetheless, in Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God (2005) and Dungeons & Dragons 3: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012). But they didn’t involve any of the original actors (save Bruce Payne in Wrath of the Dragon God), and didn’t even make it to theatres properly (Wrath of the Dragon God) or at all (Book of Vile Darkness).

Paramount and Hasbro will hope that this fourth attempt turns out to be better than all of those. That they’ve managed to pique Pine’s interest bodes well. Dungeons & Dragons plans to begin filming in the first quarter of 2021, according to Deadline, in the Northern Ireland capital of Belfast. That was also where another fantasy epic, Game of Thrones, spent all eight of its seasons.

Dungeons & Dragons is slated to open May 27, 2022 in cinemas worldwide.