'Dungeons & Dragons' embarks on an epic quest to finally make money

With 'Honor Among Thieves' in cinemas now, can Hasbro overcome 50 years of D&D business disasters without enraging its fan base?

'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' is a big-budget, CGI-laden spectacle co-produced by Paramount Pictures and Hasbro’s in-house EOne Studio, starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez as a couple of wisecracking, world-saving thieves.

Past the Mr Potato Head statuary in the parking lot, past the phalanx of vintage GI Joe soldiers lining the hallway, past the old-timey Monopoly board hanging on the wall, Chris Cocks stops in front of a whiteboard.

“Let me just erase these corporate secrets,” says the chief executive officer of Hasbro Inc. Two reporters visiting the toymaker’s headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, USA, corkscrew their necks trying to decode what appears to be company financials. Then Cocks raises his hand and wipes it all away.

If only he could make some recent entries in Hasbro’s ledger disappear as easily. In January, following a bout of weak holiday sales, the company announced it would cut 15% of its workforce. By March, its shares were down by more than 40% from the year before.

It has suggested to anxious investors that brighter days are coming as it doubles down on one of the most seemingly valuable franchises in gaming, Dungeons & Dragons ( D&D), the classic tabletop role-playing game (RPG).

“It’s a good time to be a fan,” Cocks says.

This weekend, Hasbro will kick off a D&D blitz, starting with the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It’s a big-budget, CGI-laden spectacle co-produced by Paramount Pictures and Hasbro’s in-house EOne Studio, starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez as a couple of wisecracking, world-saving thieves.

In August, Baldur’s Gate III, the latest sequel in a popular series of video games based on D&D, is set to go on sale, followed by the release of a live-action D&D TV series being developed for Paramount+. And sometime next year, Hasbro is expected to unveil One D&D, the next iteration of the tabletop game.

D&D, the granddaddy of RPGs at almost 50 years old, has been enjoying a cultural renaissance. Thanks in part to its starring role in Netflix’s hit series Stranger Things — perhaps the biggest coup in non-product placement — the game has minted a new generation of dice-slinging fans, along with D&D-themed podcasts, Twitch shows and D&D influencers on YouTube and TikTok.

Hugh Grant plays Forge in 'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' which is in cinemas now.

Cocks, himself an avid D&D player, says that the traditional version of the game is played by millions of people and that “the bigger opportunity for us” will come from product extensions and new audiences.

Which is a very gentle way of saying that Hasbro needs to finally make some money from the revered franchise.

Cynthia Williams, president of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming, the Hasbro division that operates D&D, told investors at an event in December that “ D&D has never been more popular ... but the brand is undermonetised.”

Hasbro is now trying to replicate with D&D what it did with its geeky corporate sibling, Magic: The Gathering. 

It built the fantasy card game into its first billion-dollar brand, thanks in part to an aggressive expansion into mobile gaming, media licensing agreements and ancillary products.

Multi-billion dollar revenues

Today, Hasbro makes about $4bn (€3.7bn) a year from toys, $1bn (€920m) from entertainment and $1.3bn (€1.2bn) from its Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming division. 

The company doesn’t break out D&D-specific numbers for investors, but Arpine Kocharyan, an analyst at UBS, has estimated that D&D generates more than $150m (€138m) in annual sales.

Judging by the game’s history, supersizing D&D’s coffers won’t be a simple quest. The brand has often struggled to live up to its potential, leaving in its wake decades of infighting, litigation, and squandered opportunities. 

And sure enough, just as Hasbro was gearing up to mobilise its zealous fan base for the feature film, it hit yet another self-inflicted snag.

For more than 20 years, Wizards had maintained an explicitly laissez-faire system in which anyone was free to use D&D’s basic game mechanics and trappings to create supplementary books, spinoff games, and other products catering to fans. 

In late 2022, though, Hasbro began approaching tabletop gaming companies with a new, more restrictive licensing contract that would seemingly end D&D’s open-source era and replace it with one controlled more tightly by the company.

When the contract leaked online, angry fans began circulating petitions chastising Hasbro for its perceived avarice and threatening to boycott various D&D products, including the forthcoming movie. 

Chris Pine and Regé-Jean Page in a scene from 'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves'; fans reacted to Hasbro's restrictive licensing by threatening to boycott the film among other D&D products. Picture: Aidan Monaghan

On social media, they slammed promotions for Honor Among Thieves. With the risk to its big Hollywood play mounting, Hasbro apologised and backtracked, temporarily defusing the controversy.

But for those who’ve managed the business of D&D in the past, the great licensing war of 2023 was a reminder of how difficult it can be to get its fans to go along with change.

Lorraine Williams, who led D&D’s original parent company, TSR, for a decade between the 1980s and ’90s, describes its players as voracious, intellectually driven readers “with unusually long attention spans”. They also tend to be instinctively hostile toward anything reeking of commercialisation.

“I say this with all due reverence and tons of respect: There’s a certain snobbishness among D&D players, because they are so bright,” she says.

Any new addition, particularly if it’s perceived to be dumbed down, is going to burn up the wires.

Dungeons & Dragons was invented in 1974 by a pair of Midwestern gaming enthusiasts, Gary Gygax and David Arneson. 

It emerged from two evolutionarily convergent groups: hobbyists who collected miniature war figures such as soldiers and tanks, and writers who conjured up sets of rules for war games that people could play using dice to guide their Lilliputian armies. 

D&D’s creators added a fantasy spin and shifted the focus from battalions and brigades to the individual.

Players each create a character from a particular race, such as elves or dwarves, and a vocational class, such as barbarians or clerics. 

They and their friends then steer their characters through various group missions, fighting monsters and overcoming obstacles.

Characters gain power by accumulating experience and wealth, carrying it over from one session to the next. 

In every pod of players, one managerially inclined type serves as the dungeon master, organising the challenges and transforming the game into a richly imaginative group adventure.

Elaborate rules of 'Dungeons & Dragons'

The star of D&D isn’t a particular hero or villain but rather the elaborate set of rules laid out in three dense hardcover books that can each retail for around $50: Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and, Dungeon Master’s Guide. 

The Player’s Handbook alone has more than 300 pages of directives, covering virtually every scenario imaginable, whether it’s waging combat, casting spells or filing lifestyle expenses.

Typically, D&D gatherings come in two flavours: In “theatre of the mind” sessions, the dungeon master describes all the action without much in the way of physical props. 

In “tactical combat”, objects such as maps, terrains, and minifigurines help players keep track of the action.

Both styles rely heavily on dice — including a 20-sided die, a magnificently contrived vortex of chance and the reigning icon of D&D culture — to determine outcomes. 

Both also rely on supplemental adventure modules, slim books with intriguing titles ( Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh), that lay out a specific set of challenging biomes with monsters that the players can attempt to navigate under the dungeon master’s guidance.

When D&D arrived, many in the war-gaming community — adults often hailing from military backgrounds — decried the fantasy elements of D&D as child’s play. But by the late 1970s, it had become a mainstream hit.

Sophia Lillis plays Doric in 'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves'.

As the game’s popularity soared, TSR, the company Gygax had started in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, seemed ready to soar with it. But then TSR embarked on an ill-advised spending spree. To diversify revenue, it acquired a needlepoint shop, hoping fans would embrace D&D-themed knitting kits. (They did not.)

To improve community relations, it funded an effort to salvage a sunken ship discovered at the bottom of Geneva Lake. (Parts of the Lucius Newberry were successfully recovered.) And in a half-baked marketing stunt, the company sponsored the US Olympic bobsled team.

Between 1976 and 1984, according to the book Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, TSR’s annual revenue grew from $300,000 to $29.6m — but over the same stretch, the company went from an annual profit of $19,000 to losses of $750,000. Debts mounted, lawsuits proliferated, and a feud raged between Gygax and Arneson, resulting in years of recriminations and litigation.

Treacherous terrain

D&D adventures are often set in treacherous terrain, including shadowy catacombs teeming with orcs and scruffy archipelagos overrun with ghost pirates. However, arguably no milieu would prove more frightful for TSR’s executives than the sun-kissed hills of Hollywood.

In the early 1980s, Gygax, freshly divorced and antsy for a new revenue source, decamped from Wisconsin to Los Angeles. There he racked up sizable bills for the company, renting a sprawling mansion, throwing decadent soirees and retaining the Oscar-winning screenwriter James Goldman to work on a script for an R-rated D&D movie.

Tinseltown riches proved elusive. In 1983 an animated D&D cartoon series began airing on Saturday mornings, but it was bludgeoned by The Smurfs in the ratings and was cancelled after three seasons.

So in the early 1990s, TSR sold its movie rights to Courtney Solomon, a 19-year-old Canadian science-fiction fan with big dreams of making a Star Wars-like trilogy of films. 

According to the Los Angeles Times, Solomon initially approached the company incognito, posing as an economics student. Somehow — perhaps because roguish bravado is a much-cherished quality in both the D&D universe and Hollywood — Solomon won the confidence of TSR executives.

Over the next several years, some A-list directors, including James Cameron and Francis Ford Coppola, took a look at Solomon’s project, but ultimately they all passed.

Solomon decided to direct it himself, with backing from Hong Kong import-export magnate Allan Zeman, somehow attracting a cast that included Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch. and Marlon Wayans.

When Dungeons & Dragons arrived in cinemas in 2000, critics knocked its absurd costumes, meandering plot, and unintentionally hilarious script.

The film grossed less than $35m worldwide, a missed financial opportunity for Hasbro that would grow even more glaring the next year, when the first Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films arrived in cinemas. 

Each of those earned upwards of $850m in box office sales and gave rise to two of the decade’s most lucrative film franchises.

As much as Hasbro execs might have wished for the embarrassing saga to end there, over the next dozen years, Solomon would have a hand in two additional D&D movies, both of which went direct to basic cable.

With a planned fourth, he told an entertainment website in 2013 he was optimistic he’d finally get it right

By 2015, after two long years of litigation and an undisclosed settlement, Hasbro finally regained control of D&D’s Hollywood fate.

Jeremy Irons in 2000 film release of 'Dungeons & Dragons'; critics knocked its absurd costumes, meandering plot, and unintentionally hilarious script.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, dungeon masters flocked online, convening their parties using a slew of new digital tools and enhancements created not by Wizards or Hasbro, but by the thriving ecosystem the OGL had seeded. 

One service, D&D Beyond, which helped players track character evolution and campaign progress, suddenly seemed unstoppable, raking in up to $5.99 a month from each subscriber.

Then, in February 2022, with D&D’s popularity soaring and money pouring in from Magic, the company promoted Cocks to CEO following the recent death of longtime Hasbro boss Brian Goldner. The D&D community largely ignored the ascension of one of its own to the top of the corporate empire.

Cocks’s first big move at the helm: acquiring D&D Beyond for $146.3 m. Hasbro executives said that the acquisition would give it a direct look into the behaviour of D&D customers, allowing Wizards to capitalise on the game’s increasingly digital future. 

Almost 15 years after its first major attempt, the world’s most famous fantasy game was still trying to crack digital.

The premiere

If anyone attending the Honor Among Thieves premiere at South by Southwest three weeks ago was carrying the franchise’s baggage, they left it at the door. 

Inside the packed Paramount Theatre in Austin, where the movie kicked off the opening night of the annual film and TV festival, the event’s director confessed that she’d never played the game but praised the movie for its accessibility.

D&D die-hard and co-director Jonathan Goldstein, who was behind fare such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, amped up fellow fans in the audience. In a Q&A afterward, the film’s star, Pine, said he’d recently learned to play the game along with his 82-year-old father.

With a healthy $150m (€138m) budget, the action-comedy tells the story of Edgin, a raffish, lute-wielding bard (Pine) who rallies a ragtag group of gifted and talented misfits with the help of his barbarian buddy Holga (Rodriguez) to find a lost relic and rescue his estranged daughter from a mopey red wizard (Daisy Head) and a beguiling, double-crossing poltroon (Hugh Grant).

En route they encounter a cavalcade of D&D monsters including an owlbear, a gelatinous cube, a displacer beast, a stone golem, an intellect devourer, a mimic and a plump red dragon. 

Deploying a whirlwind of classic spells, the band of adventurers travel far and wide, ultimately tapping their inner potential for greatness.

The film’s success rests not only on whether it produces big numbers this spring, but also on whether it spawns a long-living franchise.

Jeremy Latcham, Sophia Lillis, Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, and Jonathan Goldstein attend the Mexico City premiere of 'Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves' at Cinepolis Universidad last month in Mexico City. Picture: Antonio Torres/Getty/Paramount Pictures

Hasbro has already set the industry bar for this dynamic. Since 2007 its six ‘Transformers’ films, based on its humanoid-vehicles toys, have generated almost $5bn in ticket sales. Cocks, who says he sat in on early cuts and offered feedback on Honor Among Thieves, thinks it has similarly broad potential.

“It’s a love letter for the fans,” he says. “But it’s still really accessible in a Guardians of the Galaxy kind of way.”

The initial reviews out of Austin were promising. “Delightful Nerd Bait,” read the headline from Vanity Fair. 

The hardcore proved to be a tougher audience: A review on RPG site dicebreaker.com called it “a forgettable story in a fantastic, faithful world”, featuring plot and characters that are “disappointingly uninspiring and derivative”.

By late March, Honor Among Thieves was tracking to open at $21m (€19.3m) to $30m (€27.6m) domestically for a total US run of $52m (€47.8m) to $110m (€101m) , according to Box Office Pro. Not exactly peak-Marvel numbers, considering Guardians of the Galaxy opened at $94m (€86.4m) domestically.

Enticing newcomers to 'Dungeons & Dragons'

Of course, the other goal is for the film to entice newcomers to play the game. 

Around the time of the movie’s arrival, the company will roll out a feature on D&D Beyond’s website to cater to newbies who walk out of the cinema and hop online to learn the basics.

And for existing fans, sometime in 2024 Hasbro will release One D&D, the latest edition of the game. 

Along with a new set of rulebooks, it promises an immersive “virtual tabletop” built using the Unreal Engine, the 3D computer graphics tool created by Epic Games, maker of the video game Fortnite.

Hasbro’s plan is to lean into a model that’s proven lucrative for video games: Give away the game for free, or at a low cost, then upsell players on flashy avatar apparel, loot boxes, and other extras. 

And if it doesn’t alienate any more of its fanbase, finally make some money.

• Adapted from a longer Blomberg article