Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves‘ dismal box office performance looks even more unfortunate when compared to the $439 million action fantasy film currently taking Netflix by storm. When it came time to prove itself in theaters early last year, Dungeons & Dragons surprisingly fell flat despite being cut out for success. In addition to Dungeons & Dragons’ big-name cast, including lead star Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, and Hugh Grant, the movie had a whopping $150 million budget to capitalize on and a fantasy adventure premise suited for the big screen.

Dungeons & Dragons adapted its story from the iconic tabletop role-playing fantasy game, depicting a thief named Edgin Darvis (Pine) and a ragtag group of adventurers as they execute a heist to retrieve a valuable relic. The cleverly humorous, action-packed adaptation impressed not just D&D IP fans but also critics, as evidenced by the movie’s Certified Fresh score of 91% on Rotten Tomatoes. In the face of it all, Dungeons & Dragons still frustratingly flopped, earning about $207 million worldwide, well under what it would need to recover its expenses and be considered a success.

Warcraft On Netflix Is A Reminder Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ Box Office Should Have Been Much Better

Warcraft Was 2x As Big But Was Not Received As Well As Dungeons & Dragons

Dungeons & Dragons’ performance is doubly vexing when considering the ongoing success of the kindred movie Warcraft. Warcraft’s premise is also based on a popular fantasy RPG – Blizzard Entertainment’s online game World of Warcraft – and the movie shared an almost equivalent production budget to Dungeons & Dragons at $160 million. Theoretically, Dungeons & Dragons should have been able to produce similar, or, at the very least, closer earnings to Warcraft’s $439 million worldwide gross, especially on the account that it was a much better movie in the eyes of critics and audiences.

Title
Budget
Worldwide Gross
RT Critics Score

RT Audience Score

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
$150,000,000
$207,854,947
91%
93%

Warcraft
$160,000,000
$438,899,824
29%
76%

A $439 million haul may make Warcraft two times bigger than Dungeons & Dragons, and the former film’s current popularity on Netflix (#3 of Netflix’s top 10 movies in the U.S. today) may justify its incredible box office haul – but Dungeons & Dragons welcomed a much better reception. For critics, in particular, Dungeons & Dragons came across as well-made, skillfully blending humor and action with great world-building that anyone, including those unfamiliar with D&D, would find delightful. Critics couldn’t say the same of Warcraft. Audiences were more receptive to it, butstill, Warcraft lagged in overall approval behind Dungeons & Dragons.

Why Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Underperformed At The Box Office

The Odds Were Stacked Against Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The various reasons that would explain why Dungeons & Dragons underperformed at the box office reveal that the odds weren’t in its favor. Unlike Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons was released in a considerably more grueling period in cinema, as theatergoer trends and the forecast of any movie’s box office performance have become unpredictable. Competition from the releases of highly anticipated films such as Super Mario Bros. and John Wick: Chapter Four, coupled with the fact that it had to rely more on word of mouth, meant that Dungeons & Dragons was facing greater challenges in the theatrical marketplace of 2023.

Dungeon & Dragons would have had to pull out all the stops to entice the number of viewers it needed outside of fans of its comparatively smaller IP. D&D does have an impressive following, but without effective marketing strategies, the movie was a hard sell for IP newcomers inundated with the promise of almost immediately recognizable franchises that harbored great promotional backing and even better audience reviews. That said, as hard as it was for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves to put its foot in the door, its more favorable aspects persist among the wreckage of its box office.

Will Honor Among Thieves 2 Happen? Dungeons & Dragon’s Future Explained

The Prospect Of A Dungeons & Dragons Sequel Seems Downright Fantastical

The commercial failure of the movie makes the possible Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves 2 seem much less likely. It could very well join the ranks of stalled Chris Pine sequels that also includes the fourth Star Trek movie following the trilogy of reboot movies starring the actor as iconic sci-fi character Captain James T. Kirk. However, in a 2023 Variety profile, Paramount Pictures CEO Brian Robbins hinted that the D&D sequel could still move forward if it was given a much smaller budget that would make it much less of a financial risk.

A planned Dungeons & Dragons television spinoff that was ordered straight to series in early 2023 was later scrapped by Paramount+…

A cheaper sequel could succeed, considering the fact that – as far as the raw numbers go – Honor Among Thieves was the 29th highest-grossing movie of 2023 worldwide. It surpassed many other releases, including other major movies that have earned sequels or follow-ups such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Insidious: The Red Door, Evil Dead Rise, and Saw X. However, a planned Dungeons & Dragons television spinoff that was ordered straight to series in early 2023 was later scrapped by Paramount+, which could indicate that the company as a whole is abandoning the property for the time being.

Warcraft’s Box Office Was Not Enough To Get A Sequel Greenlight Either

Warcraft 2 Has Failed To Materialize After Eight Years

The prospect of Honor Among Thieves 2 ever getting made looks even grimmer in the face of the fact that the possible Warcraft 2 was never made either. This was the case despite the movie’s strong box office returns against its budget and an ensemble cast that included stars who were less A-list than those of Dungeons & Dragons, meaning their salaries might be considerably lower. While a new movie based on the property was announced in 2020, it wasn’t clear if it was in the same continuity and no major progress has been made in the ensuing four years.

The cast of Warcraft includes Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Ben Foster, Dominic Cooper, Toby Kebbell, Ben Schnetzer, Robert Kazinsky, and Daniel Wu.

Ultimately, fantasy movies like Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves have major special effects requirements that lead to inflated price tags, which could be what is inhibiting both sequels. While movie sequels can earn more than their predecessors, diminishing returns frequently require budgets to get tighter and tighter in order to make a return on investment. However, there is a limit to how tightthe budget of a movie taking place in a fantastical realm can ever get, raising the bar for how much money a fantasy property needs to make in order to be considered successful.