The new trailer for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was revealed yesterday at Comic-Con 2022 before being shared online, and fantasy fans are getting excited. The film has a packed cast of stars, is full of action and adventure, and most importantly looks like it’s going to be a barrel of laughs
The trailer opens with Chris Pine’s character Elgin explaining: “Truth be told, we helped the wrong person steal the wrong thing. We didn’t mean to release the greatest evil the world has ever known. But we’re going to fix it.”
The story follows a group of thieves who are going to sort out the really awkward matter of this unleashed evil.
“Who needs heroes when you have thieves,” says the trailer.
The subsequent scenes are a boisterous mix of basically every fantasy film you have ever seen. There are dragons, knights, battles, magic, futuristic tech, magical creatures, horses, ice landscapes and mountains. Think The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe meets Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings meets Stardust, Pan’s Labyrinth meets Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, and so on.
And after all the terribly serious world-ending drama presented in the recent trailers of the new Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings spin-offs, it comes as a real breath of fresh air to see a fantasy film being so unapologetically light-hearted.
The film stars Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page, Fast & Furious’ Michelle Rodríguez, Jurassic World Dominion’s Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis - whose credits include Netflix’s I Am Not Okay with This and the 2020 film Gretel & Hansel.
Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley have written and directed the movie. The duo often work together, co-writing 2011’s Horrible Bosses and 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, and co-directing 2018’s Game Night.
Speaking to Collider in March, Pine said: “The way that I’ve been describing [the movie], it’s like Game of Thrones mixed with a little Princess Bride, just a smidge of Holy Grail; it’s somewhere in that ballpark.
“It’s a lot of fun. It’s got a lot of thrills. It’s poppy, it’s eighties heartfelt, there’s a bit of Goonies in there.”
At Comic-Con Pine added to this description, saying the film has “a Spielbergian energy to it”.
During his first-ever appearance at Comic-Con yesterday, Hugh Grant said: “My agent said, ‘I’m going to send you this Dungeon and Dragons thing’. I thought, ‘I don’t think that’s for me dear’. And then I read it, and it’s like, really hilarious.
“The two Jonathans who wrote and directed it must have been very steeped in Monty Python or something. Because it was a properly funny script.”
The film is likely to be a massive hit. Dungeons & Dragons is a classic table-top fantasy role-play game that first came out in the seventies.
Although there have been three previous Dungeons & Dragons films (released in 2000, 2005 and 2012) they didn’t meet blockbuster-level success, but over the last decade the popularity of the historical fantasy genre has now reached stratospheric levels.
“Anyone who plays D&D knows it’s not just a game. It is the feeling you get when you play the game,” said writer-director John Francis Daley.
