What The Dungeons & Dragons Movie Costumes Reveal About The Story

Recent photographs have provided the first glimpse at the costumes of the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie, and they give some hints at the story. The shots of Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, and Michelle Rodriguez suggest that Dungeons & Dragons will use a fairly standard fantasy setting and feature an action-oriented plot, using its loaded cast to create a full adventuring party. The movie was originally set to be released this year but was pushed back to 2023 due to the COVID pandemic.

Dungeons & Dragons has always been an odd franchise to adapt. At its core is a tabletop roleplaying game that relies on players generating their own characters and storylines. The Dungeons & Dragons books provide a plethora of rich worlds, imaginative monsters, and character options, as well as multiple character arcs, but the entire point of the game is for players to generate their own collective story. For this reason, attempts to adapt the franchise to fiction have usually been awkward, from the 1980s cartoon to a series of paperback books to a 2000 live-action flop.

Photos from the set show Rodriguez and Pine in medieval/fantasy costumes, which suggests that Dungeons & Dragons will make use of one of its more traditional fantasy settings like Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms. These settings draw from inspirations like Lord of the Rings‘ Middle-Earth and European folk tales.  Dungeons & Dragons supports a number of settings for its campaigns, including more steampunk worlds like Eberron or crossovers with properties ranging from Magic: the Gathering to Rick & Morty, but it appears the movie will be sticking to the settings most associated with the game.

Rodriguez also appears to be wearing fantasy-style armor. This costume would suggest that she is some kind of warrior or perhaps a rogue, one of Dungeon & Dragon‘s acrobatic thieves. More recent set photos of Michelle Rodriguez show her with visible scars on her arms, adding to the suggestion that her character is experienced in battle. The core game has a number of different “classes” for player characters like fighters, wizards, and clerics, and encourages a mixed team. While Pine’s costume is less visible in the photographs, he seems likely to fill one of the less brawny roles in comparison to the Fast & Furious franchise’s Rodriguez. That same set of photos shows Rodriguez and Justice Smith on a dragon-shaped boat, suggesting that the movie will deliver on the “dragons” in its title.

Those pictures also included Hugh Grant, who will play an antagonist named Forge Fletcher. The photos gave a rather solid look at Grant’s costume, which includes a set of robes or long jacket that blends between brown fabric and blood-red leather. This costume would be appropriate for a sinister mage or perhaps a merchant. Press releases for the movie have stated that the plot will revolve around a quest to find the Eye of Vecna, an artifact with a long history in various Dungeons & Dragons adventures and supplemental material. It’s entirely possible that Grant’s Fletcher wants this object, too, or even that he’s the one who hires the other characters to find it.

The Dungeons & Dragons franchise provides an opportunity for infinite stories, but this freedom offers a lot of room to get things wrong. Certainly, video game movie adaptations have a checkered past, and they mostly have more concrete stories and characters than DnD. But these recently-revealed costumes from the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons movie suggest that the film is sticking to a traditional medieval fantasy look and a recognizable adventuring party, giving a solid foundation to the film. Time will tell whether the story can match those of tabletop players’ expectations.

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