Over the last decade, Dungeons & Dragons has gone from a geeky tabletop RPG to, well, a geeky tabletop RPG with serious skin in the mainstream game. From Stranger Things with its demogorgons and mind flayers, to full-blown blockbuster movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, to award-winning video game epic Baldur's Gate III, D&D has been right at the forefront of a recent years boom in the fantasy space. And now, per Deadline's reporting, Netflix are getting ready to roll the dice with Stranger Things EP Shawn Levy, WeCrashed creator Drew Crevello, and Hasbro on The Forgotten Realms, a live-action series based on the classic D&D campaign setting.
Now, as you may recall, not so long ago Rawson Marshall Thurber was cooking up a live-action Dungeons & Dragons TV series with Crevello for then-Hasbro subsidiary eOne and Paramount+. But after Lionsgate bought out eOne in late 2023, plans for the show fell through and Crevello set about redeveloping the show as its own thing — which yes, sadly does mean that we won't be seeing Chris Pine's Edgin or any of the Honour Among Thieves crew cropping up in The Forgotten Realms anytime soon. All of which is to say that Crevello has now whipped up a pilot screenplay and is set to serve as showrunner on this proposed new series, which has gone into development at Netflix with Levy attached to produce. And, according to Deadline's intel, if the series takes off, then it could mark the birth of a new interconnected fantasy universe for the streamer, whose current biggest genre draws, Stranger Things and The Witcher, are both set to end over the next couple of years.
For the time being, we don't know what The Forgotten Realms will wind up looking like, what story Crevello is looking to tell, which characters will be in it and who will play them, or — if we're being totally frank and honest — whether it'll even make it to our screens at all. But given the limitless possibilities of the eponymous realm, and of D&D as a lore-rich universe that has still been woefully underexplored on screen for the most part, if Crevello and Levy can get this project off the ground then they may well have a critical hit on their hands. Pun intended.