Paramount Rolls Dice On ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Revamp, Eyes Possible $65M+ WW Opening – Box Office Preview
29.03.2023 - 18:17
/ deadline.com
Paramount and Hasbro eOne with the greatest of intentions have created an extremely fun, broad-audience appealing feature take on the classic roleplaying game, entitled Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which already is 90% certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes –not an easy feat with a genre movie of this caliber– and 94% with moviegoers.
Paramount blasted the movie appropriately so out of SXSW on its opening night to a great response, and they’ve screened the pic extensively including a partnership with Amazon in the walk-up to its opening. However, tracking hasn’t been kind to the $150M production, 50% co-financed by eOne, only seeing a $30M-$40M start stateside. The hope is that walk-up business off the hot word of mouth will overindex this movie at 3,850 theaters, which inherits all the premium theaters from Lionsgate’s John Wick: Chapter 4.
The previous feature attempt with D&D didn’t go so well under New Line with a $7.2M domestic debut, $15.4M stateside result and near $34M WW, 23 years ago. That pic starred a number of fresh face actors and also included Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans. This version of D&D touts Bridgerton‘s Rege-Jean Page, Chris Pine, Fast & Furious‘ Michelle Rodriguez, It‘s Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith and Hugh Grant.
The comp here for the John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein directed movie is Sony’s Uncharted, which opened to $44M domestic, and ultimately made $148.6M US/Canada and $401.7M worldwide off a $120M production cost. Sony declared a feature franchise off those results for the big screen take of that Sony Playstation game, and if Dungeons & Dragons can potentially emulate those results, well then, mission accomplished. Official previews in U.S. and Canada