Why Couldn't the Dungeons and Dragons Movies Have Been This Good?

This isn't going to be a review, so you can just fault me for false advertising right now.  No, instead this is more of a lament, for something that should have been great, but fell on its face.  

I'm speaking of the Dungeons and Dragons Movies, of course.  

The first D&D movie had promise... if you didn't look too close.  It had established actors, most notably Jeremy Irons, and it had a fairly large budget of $45 million when it was made in 2000.  Despite that the movie was simply awful.  Gary Gygax even dissed the movie in the gamer documentary Uber Goober.

What can I say about this film?  Not much that is good, that's for damn sure.  It's almost painful to watch from start to finish.  I'm actually getting angry just thinking about it.  The plot is awful, the characters are terrible, the acting is worse, the direction is a joke, and the special effects suck for the most part.  

None of that is the worst part, though.  The worst part is that the film was named Dungeons and Dragons.  For years studios have believed that fantasy movies, and specifically D&D could not be made into a successful movie.  Right around the time that this movie was made some changed their minds and greenlit a bunch of fantasy movies like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings.  While those two franchises soared to record box office numbers D&D grossed a whopping 15.2 million dollars domestically and 33 million world wide.  So the real tragedy is that this film seemed to confirm studio suspicions about the lack of viability of a D&D movie when the reality is that the movie just sucked because of the people put in charge of making it, most notably wirter/director Courtney Solomon.

Despite the first movie sucking lama balls a second movie was made.  This was not a big Hollywood production, but rather a made for TV film.  Dungeons and Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God was better the the original, which is kind of surprising, but still not very good... which is less surprising. 

The film was billed as a sequel to the first film, though nothing is the same save Bruce Payne and the name of his character, Damodar.  The film is better in that, unlike its predessor, it is the Dungeon and Dragons film.  There are numerous references from in the game including a cleric of Obad-Hai, a mage who uses standard D&D spells like Lightning Bolt and Teleport, the fighter wielding a Vorpal Sword, and a sleezy theif who specializes in finding and disarming traps.  Even with all this the film is at best a one time watch for hard core D&D fans who can appreciate all these things.  It lacked the budget of the first one, and did as much as one might expect with a total budget of 12 million dollars.  

That having been said, I'd like to see what the Dead Gentlemen could do with a 12 million dollar budget!  Their masterpiece, The Gamers 2: Dorness Rising was made on a miniscule budget and is more of a D&D movie than either of the official titiles. 

You might think that they should just scrap the idea of making a live action movie and try for an animated one.  It would certainly be cheaper and easier to produce.  Oh wait, they tried that too with Scourge of Worlds.  SoW is a little known of project that was a straight to video interactive adventure that fell flat on its face.  How could this also be a failure?  How hard it is to make a great fantasy animation video?  

Hmmm....

Wow... I guess it can be done.