For one thing , like I said, I really hate the movie Harry and Ron. I find them impossible to like, annoying and having the collective IQ of a paper cup. Paradoxically, the incredibly strong adult supporting cast, composed of some of the best british actors, is almost detrimental, because put in the same room with those great actors, the main cast only seemed to fail even worse. To be fair, Emma Watson did manage to get better as an actress as time went by, possibly the only thing about the franchise to improve over time.

As for the rest, I just always found it that the movies made the faults of the books more evident, while losing most of what was good about them. The "magical" world of Harry Potter always felt too mundane for me, and the movies only made it felt even less fantastic. The movies don't have any magical or mysterious mood for me. Nothing dreamlike, surreal or special. It just reinforces how crude the world building and the imagination of the books really is. Likewise, where the plot of the books would be paper thin or outright make no sense, when chopped up to fit in a movie those faults would be laid bare, even worse than when somewhat coverd by some fluff in the novels.

And as the movies went on they only got worse. The Half Blood Prince is downright hilarious in how nonsensical and incoherent it is at least for someone who has not read the book.

No, it's about how it's presented. The mood, the atmosphere, the feel. I literally just told you:

The movies don't have any magical or mysterious mood for me. Nothing dreamlike, surreal or special.

It's our everyday, mundane world. It just has some magic sprinkled on it. A picture in a newspaper moves, gnomes run the bank. But in the end it's still a newspaper and a bank and there it's all rather boring. And as the movies fail to make it feel special or mysterious or anything, it's even more mundane, beacause when reading the book my imagination would make the magical world look maybe more colorful, more distinct, more... well, magical. But in the movies it has all the magic of a theme park ride.

You see, I grew up reading the Wizard of Earthsea. So I knew just how powerful, mysterious and imaginative the "simple premise" about "a magic-empowered boy goes to a school for Wizards and has adventure" could be. Or just look at the scope and imagination of Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic (by the way, yes, it's curious if Rowling got the glasses wearing kid wizard in training with a pet owl from this).

Good, most D&D isn't Planescape: Torment, it's just generic fantasy, best to have some fun with it. Besides, D&D is just a setting for people to tell their own stories in, I can think of no property where just doing your own thing would be more fitting than this one.

Which is ridiculous because it's exactly what the audience has seen before, in those movies. If you try to make a movie that's a derivative mash-up of those movies (as opposed to something that's actually original), what you'll get is a derivative mash-up of those movies, and it's going to come across as being a pale imitation of all three.

I loved LOTR, and Raiders, and GOTG remains one of my favorite Marvel Phase II movies. Those movies all worked (IMO) because they actually put effort into to doing something original. If you're going to try to ape all of those for a D&D movie, it'll just come across as being like a bad Aslyum mockbuster at best, and something on the level of the simply awful 2000 movie at worst. They could even do something meta like have the plot revolve around a group of friends playing through the game (like Freaks and Geeks) - that way they could do something more character-driven, where we get to see the party and their real-life equivalents grow and change as they progress through the campaign. Even take a little bit of inspiration from the HP movies and make it a series, where we follow the group from a young age and into middle/high-school and beyond. I remember hearing somewhere (either in a RLM or Jimquisition episode) that Hollywood is very good at identifying successful trends, but it's not very good at capitalizing on them. Movies that were more self-aware and less-serious -- like Iron Man, Ant-Man, GOTG and now *Deadpool -- did really well. Movies that tried to go the superserious route, like Fantastic Four 2015, didn't. The problem is that being either superserious or lighthearted can work really well for a Superhero/SFF movie; the key is understanding your source material well enough to know what kind of tone fits it best.

I'm not saying you can't make a DnD movie lighthearted. But for the love of God, don't weigh the movie down with "smart" one-liners, stilted "edgy" humor, or insulting fart/poop/sex jokes in the name of making it "more fun".

*And as a sidenote, With Deadpool it's also worrying in that we may see more people trying to ape Deadpool with rated-R humor and fourth-wall breaking, in movies where that wouldn't fit at all.

Good post, in my eyes, Rampancy.

This is pretty much a guarantee, given the success of Deadpool.

They should get the dude who made the third D&D movie. That was the closest "follow a group of D&D characters" movie I saw. Effects where solid; they had a nice inter-party banter, they where quite good to correctly present stuff like spells that fail or equipment like a vorpal sword. It was not a Lotro epic and not the Jesus of D&D/Fantasy movies. But they put effort in it and had fun; unlike the first one I can suggest this to anyone who likes D&D.

I wonder who currently has the rights to Elric? Failing that to be resolved I wonder if Moorcock is willing to make available for not only option, but also willing to demand creative control; on any of the other Eternal Champions; such as Hawkmoon, Corum, Erekosë or Cornelius?

That kind of reminds me of wannabe jocks that would try to harass you for playing tabletop RPGs right before going to read the sports pages to check how well they were doing in their fantasy sports league, not being the least bit aware of the huge irony of the situation...

I seriously hope that DC take that as a signal that the World is ready for a true to the source (Pre N52) Lobo movie :D

I watched the first of the hobbit remake and it was... horrible... The good parts cut too short, material that heavily deviated from the previous film/book, the wrong actor as Bilbo, the trolls.. (uggg), unrelated 'things to come' for lord of the rings which weren't suppose to be there, etc etc.

Reminds me, the trolls look WAY too similar in my mind to the new TMNT turtles look... which annoys me too much to watch those either.

Safe to say though, almost anything they do probably won't be as bad as the previous D&D movie. Then again I'm not sure. Actually i preferred The Gamers, especially the second one Dorkness Rising, as it heavily showed what the game was really like during play, how things visually ended up half the time, cliches, the monsters, etc etc. :) Suddenly i have visually in mind of an artifact being found in D&D, and suddenly the DM walks on stage grabs it and tosses it to the side going 'No no no.. you actually found... ummm... A magical red herring!' or something. During which you see the blue screen and the characters and no CGI and no effects in place, he walks off stage and the DRAMATIC EPIC SERIOUS D&D SETTING returns :P

I actually didn't mind Martin Freeman as Bilbo, what I did mind was that he wasn't given nearly enough screen time to justify the movie being called The Hobbit. It felt more like "A Story About A Bunch of Dwarves, Elves and Gandalf - and oh yeah, there was this little guy as well". It's as if they thought "we can't just make a movie about a hobbit, what people really want to see is quaffing dwarves and smoking hot elves!".

And another thing where they went wrong is trying to make a LOTR epic out of the light-hearted fairy tale. The Hobbit is not LOTR, and that's part of why I like it. It's its own thing, with its own tone and style, but they didn't have the courage to consistently stick to that style, they had to mix it with the serious LOTR style and that's just not working for this story. I always say the way they made the dwarves look perfectly exemplifies the problems of the movie. They don't have a believably consistent look, they're split into comic-relief dwarves with feautures of exaggerated proportions, like big noses, and serious characters that just look like smaller versions of humans, like Thorin and a few others. Funny Hobbit here, serious LOTR epic there. Two different sides that won't really fit together as one.

Last but not least, the Hobbit novel is very episodic in nature. If you don't give each episode the screen time it deserves and just rush through them (e.g. what purpose did the short Beorn scenes have in the context of the second movie?), the result will be boring and confusing. And suddenly it becomes an obvious problem for the movie that the Hobbit is just a story of "first happened this, then happened that, afterwards happened this, next happened that etc.". I think they might have thought: "that's why we need to add something to it, insert the stories about Gandalf and Arwen", but I think it's the other way around. It makes no sense to add these new characters and episodes when they don't even manage to tell the stories of the Hobbit in an appropriate way. They split the Hobbit in three long parts, only to fill it with things that are not part of the original story and then rush through the actual narration because there's no time!

I miss Jeremy Irons. At least, he'd make the movie fun to watch.

And WAAAYY too much time was spent on the trolls. True in the book gandalf would interject words and phrases to confuse the trolls and make them fight to keep things going until daybreak, which i suppose could have worked fine, but the whole 'i just sneezed a dwarf' thing, and the CGI looked horrible. Comedy where it didn't belong, and far too thinly layered.

Well the hobbit WAS epic to a degree, but that mostly was the last 15 minutes where there were 3-4 armies battling and Bilbo just said 'yep i'm out' and went invisible waiting for it all to finish itself out. However it wasn't the long sweeping ongoing 'save the world' epic, although I'm sure the lore and stories it helped establish later could be song worthy.

To be perfectly honest, i still like the animated version that was from 1977. There's a couple things that are a tad slow, but at no point does it feel unwelcome. That and it was made about the same time as The Last Unicorn (well the art style is very similar), and a few other classics which i think remakes today usually would fail.

Be glad you didn't watch the second movie. The troll scenes are tame compared to what they did with Smaug. :D

I'm glad i didn't go for the second or third movies. First one was a major turn-off for the entire thing, wish i could have my time back; Not only that i don't want to encourage then to add huge amounts of filler/crap to make a single movie push to a trilogy so they can try and suck 3x the money from me.

Hmmm... Actually it occurs to me, they could have made the hobbit as a TV series instead, 1 season (12-13 episodes) and fully explored the book keeping as close to the source material as possible. Few CGI/special effects, lots of makeup and costumes, etc... THAT would have been worth watching :) And in smaller bite-sized pieces.