As I mentioned last time, the Dungeons & Dragons film has flopped despite positive reviews and the support of D&D personalities. It's only made 180 million worldwide, meaning it will lose money. As disastrous as this is, I don't think it will impact Joe Manganiello's efforts to get a Dragonlance TV-show picked-up (which is not the same show that Paramount+ announced three months ago and whose continued existence we'll keep an eye on), although he'll now have to pitch how this will be different given that it's coming from a similar creative team (which means it will likely share the generic aesthetic of all modern fantasy adaptations).
The difficult question to answer is: why did the film fail? I've seen it twice now and it remains entertaining, so that's not the issue (my review is here). My theory is that it's not distinctive enough--the story lacks depth/weight and it looks like every other recent fantasy adaptation. It's ironic that in an effort to target the general audience it failed to attract it entirely (in fact, economically, it's going to mirror the legendary 2000 bomb from Courtney Soloman). I'll be interested to see how the community reflects on this failure (my guess is they won't; the reasoning from shills is nonsensical, 'it was never going to succeed because of the brand' (!)). Honor's failure is, in the grand scheme of things, less impactful than Shazam 2 or Ant-Man 3, as those films not were meant to promote future franchises. One of the main takeaways we have from genre films and shows of the last 6-7 years is that audiences are not attracted to their generic approach--they want something distinctive (Avatar 2) or nostalgic (Top Gun 2/Mario Brothers).
Speaking of Ant-Man 3, Jonathan Majors has been dropped by his talent manager three weeks after domestic assault charges were laid. When the incident happened, Majors' reps said there was video and text messages that would exonerate him. The former hasn't been released, but texts were and did not help the perception of Majors at all. The signal here is obvious: his management either believes he's guilty or that the public damage can't be assuaged despite his innocence. We still have no idea what really happened--this isn't an Ezra Miller situation where the evidence is out there for the public to judge. Regardless, this makes it an almost certainty that the MCU will have to re-cast Kang. I wouldn't expect any radical departure if they do and losing Majors means nothing (I've seen it jokingly suggested he'll be replaced by a POC woman, which I think is actually plausible)--while the industry has hyped the actor for some time, he has made no impact on box office or TV viewership (the Taylor Kitsch of this generation), and since Ant-Man 3 bombed there's no audience appetite that will be disappointed by his absence.
It has been awhile since we had a Conan update (July), and while news on the Netflix show remains static, the IP has moved forward on the comic side of things. Marvel let the license lapse (presumably because Kevin Feige has the same issues with the IP as Amazon's Jennifer Salke), so it's now self-publishing at Titan comics, which means all the usual censorship from Marvel or Dark House has been removed (essentially: graphic violence and boobs). Jim Zub (who is one of the writers who wrote the character at Marvel and is the only person to write a half-decent Alpha Flight comic in the last ten years) is writing it. How successful it will be among the shrinking market place of comic book buyers I don't know, but for the sake of the IP I hope it does well. If nothing else it will be distinctive from prior iterations while being firmly entrenched in the lore, which bodes well.
This article was written by Peter Levi
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