Some sequels die in development hell. Others die in boardrooms. Dungeons & Dragons just died in a spreadsheet, and honestly, that’s the most depressing way to go. Jonathan Goldstein confirmed that he and John Francis Daley wrote a full sequel script to Honor Among Thieves. It’s done. It exists. Fans will probably never see it because the first movie didn’t make enough money to justify the price tag. Capitalism wins again, and nerds lose as usual.
The math is brutal but simple. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves cost around $150 million to produce and grossed roughly $205 million worldwide. For most movies, that would be fine. For a franchise hopeful with a massive cast and expensive fantasy effects, it’s a death sentence. Studios don’t greenlight sequels based on Rotten Tomatoes scores, no matter how much we wish they did. The film sits at 91% with critics and 92% with audiences, which makes the financial failure feel even more like a cosmic joke played on everyone who actually cared.
Goldstein was refreshingly blunt about the situation. He admitted that financial reasons are keeping the sequel from happening, and he expressed genuine love for the cast and the script they wrote. That enthusiasm only makes the cancellation sting more. You can hear in his comments that Dungeons & Dragons 2 wasn’t a lazy cash grab. It was a project the creators actually cared about, which is basically a curse in modern Hollywood. The moment you pour your heart into a blockbuster, the box office gods find a way to punish you for it.
Hugh Grant, who played the villainous Forge, previously called the box office performance the biggest mystery of his career. He pointed out that nobody seemed to ask the public whether they wanted a Dungeons & Dragons movie before spending nine figures on one. It’s a fair point. The film’s quality was never the issue. The issue was that a significant chunk of the general population saw the title and immediately thought, “That’s the game my weird cousin plays in his basement.” Marketing matters, and apparently nobody thought to check if the brand had mainstream appeal beyond the tabletop crowd.
The real tragedy here is that Dungeons & Dragons proved fantasy comedies can work when given the right creative team. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, and Justice Smith had genuine chemistry. The action was inventive, the humor landed, and the world-building felt lived-in. But none of that matters when the balance sheet says no. Goldstein and Daley have moved on to other projects, including an action thriller called Renegades and the next Star Trek film. The cast has scattered to other roles. The window has closed, and it’s not opening again.
If you loved Honor Among Thieves, pour one out for the sequel that could have been. Dungeons & Dragons deserved better than to become a cautionary tale about why studios don’t take risks on original blockbusters anymore. The script is sitting in a drawer somewhere, probably gathering dust, while executives greenlight the fourteenth reboot of something nobody asked for. That’s the business, baby. And it stinks worse than a dragon’s breath.
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