D&D TV Series Will Be ‘Intimate’ According To Its Writer
Derek Kolstad, creator of the John Wick franchise, is the mind behind the upcoming D&D series. Come take a look at his plans for an ‘intimate’ series.
The creator of John Wick is creating a new Dungeons & Dragons tv series, and according to a recent interview, the upcoming show will be a more “intimate” show, something intended to show a “tiny sliver” of the world, and that it’s been an absolute joy–but that it gets “real deep, real quick.”
As Kolstad explains it, he wants to set up a show that sets us up with a look at the world that grows little by little, teasing the audience with knowledge of what’s coming up–drawing a comparison to how in A New Hope you hear the name Jabba the Hutt but you don’t see the nefarious gangster until Return of the Jedi.
Nobody tell him. It’ll break his heart.
But the point remains, Kolstad doesn’t want to throw everything up on screen and say here’s the buffet. The show should have moments where “3% of the audience know that name, and go, oh ho I bet we’ll see him soon,” which is an interesting tack to take for D&D. Because there’s many different “canons” you could pick from. But mostly D&D’s world isn’t all about the non player characters. People might know the name Drizzt Do’Urden or Elminster–and that’s a big maybe, but there are plenty of other worlds, like Greyhawk’s Oerth, or Eberron.
Likely we’d be seeing something to do with the Forgotten Realms, and the show Kolstad is proposing feels like it might be a good vehicle for slowly introducing more complex lore concepts. The mythos, as he puts it, runs deep.
But Kolstad wants to draw things out into nice character beats–he wants to see characters failing, characters in quiet moments, and understands that there will be room for cool action, but it’s all about what the characters say and do that will make the show go. The whole thing is planned to be a shorter series–and here comparisons can be drawn to shows like The Mandalorian, which does much of the same thing.
Kolstad’s show bible isn’t laying out the next 7-10 years of “D&D” but what he’s trying to do is show people the world and character they know. For now, Kolstad is sticking with “macro” meaning that he wants the reality of the license to be flexible enough that the IP won’t restrain them.
And speaking of what the rights are–everything is still kind of up in the air. No word on whether Kolstad and his team will have access to things like Dragonlance, but he would say he wants to come near the “end” of the mythos–where everything has already happened, or is about to happen.
We’ll have to see what that means when the show eventually debuts. Until then, happy adventuring!
