It's not very indirect. Many of the movie's billed producers are Hasbro & WotC executives, and a primary production company is Entertainment One, Hasbro's Hollywood division they acquired just for making this movie.

Just saw it yesterday. Not a great cinematic achievement, but a lot of fun. Thankfully the trailers oversold the "Guardians of the Galaxy" style of the film, it's nowhere near as obnoxious. It feels more like if Guy Ritchie directed a D&D film. Do I still wish we got a straight up adaptation of Dragonlance Chronicles instead? Sure. But I enjoyed this film a lot, as did a couple of friends I saw it with (and who I used to play D&D with).

There's a lot of jokes, but it does have a heart, the story is ok and feels like a D&D campaign, the characters are likeable, especially Pine, the thiefling druid, and the overleveled goody-two-shoes Paladin. The special effects are mostly pretty good, a couple of scenes suffer from the obvious green screen, and some of the costumes were very fake looking, but for the most part I think it still looked better than most such effects-heavy films these days. Really my biggest complaint is the lack of a strong villain. The real big bad remains off screen and far away, waiting for a sequel that will probably never happen, Hugh Grant is great as a smarmy douchebag but he's not really a threat in any way, so that leaves only a witch who looks kinda cool, and provides a fun fboss fight, but has zero character.

All things considered, I was quite surprised in a good way, and will definitely rewatch it at home eventually. There are still not too many decent fantasy adventures like this.