D&D TV show writer taking inspiration from Star Wars, Rambo: Collider

The Dungeons and Dragons TV series may still be a long way off — if it comes to fruition at all — but entertainment news site Collider has provided a hint at what may be to come for fans of the TTRPG.

Entertainment One has tapped in Derek Kolstad to write up the initial pitch of what a Dungeons and Dragons TV show could look like, and Collider interviewed the writer about what he has in mind.

According to Kolstad, who may be best know for his work on John Wick, instead of attempting to encompass all that the various worlds, planes, and realities of D&D, he aims to instead showcase “a tiny sliver of that world.”

Collider reports that he is hoping to focus the series in character-driven stories, as seen in both Star Wars and Rambo:

“In the first Star Wars, you heard about Jabba the Hutt and you don’t see him until the third one because you earn at that point, and whatever the budget was for the third one compared to the first one, who cares, right? And I think in Dungeons and Dragons, who has this massive, dedicated community of acolytes, I don’t want to suddenly throw everything on screen and say, ‘Here’s the buffet.’ You’d much rather keep the story intimate. When you think of our favorite movies, I’d rather do the First Blood version. It’s a guy in the woods being hunted. And it’s very small, but you allude to the other things through conversation. You have your USS Indianapolis [in Jaws], you see something in the background. You hear a name that 3% of the audience is like, ‘Ho ho, I think we’re going to see him soon.’ I think the thing is just to take a deep breath, to go into it slowly, and to just respect the world, and as you adapt, certain things need to change. But you better not touch the heart and soul of why people love this thing.”

The TV series will be coming on the heels of a D&D film that is expected to be released in 2022 starring names like Hugh Grant, Sophia Lillis, Chris Pine, Regé-Jean Page, Michelle Rodriguez, and Justice Smith, who have already been announced.

Kolstad noted in the interview that he isn’t worried about the upcoming movie overshadowing a potential TV series.

“You want everything to succeed because that’s only good for the franchise as a whole,” he said.

“If it’s this massive spectacle at a quarter billion dollars that does well, great, because I want my show to exist in a little, little subset shadow of it.”

He also notes that taking D&D to the smaller screen will have its perks.

“In TV, you get to pause. And let’s be honest, our favorite episodes of our favorite series tend to be the one where they ran out of money, and it’s two guys in a room. It’s the bottle episode, and they talk, and they go deep, and they say, ‘I am the man who knocks,’ or whatever the classic line is that I can’t remember right now from Breaking Bad. Those are your favorite moments,” Kolstad said in the Collider article.

“Action is action, and we’ll get to that, and it will be cool, but when a guy says or does a certain thing, that’s where TV has its strong point.”

Collider’s full interview with Kolstad can be found here.

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