Fans who have been awaiting the green light for the next "Dungeons and Dragons" movie should be happy to learn that the lawsuits that have been surrounding the film have finally been resolved.
According to IGN, Hasbro, Warner Bros and Sweatpea Entertainment have come to an agreement on screen rights, which have plagued the progress of the film for years.
The conflict started back in 2013 when Hasbro started working on a new "Dungeons and Dragons" film with Universal Pictures, while Warner Bros and Sweatpea began to work on their own version. Hasbro sued Sweatpea over the rights to the franchise, and the two sides became trapped in a legal battle on who really owned the rights to the franchise.
Sweatpea's original deal was purchased from the company, which originally handled D & D before it was bought by Hasbro for a mere US$15,000 back in 1994. In 2000, Sweatpea was able to produce a movie that was commercially and critically considered a flop. The deal was soon amended so that Sweatpea would produce and release sequels in a timely manner.
The Hollywood Reporter states that Universal contested the original rights of Sweatpea to the "Dungeons and Dragons" film and TV rights since Sweatpea had allowed the rights to revert. This was caused by Sweatpea's inability to make another film in a timely fashion, the last movie being "Dugeons and Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness", which debuted on the SyFy Channel back in 2012.
Warner Bros soon sued Sweatpea for US$5 million for legal costs, and the chance of seeing another "Dungeons and Dragons" movie seemed bleak.
The case was seen in front of U.S District Judge Dolly Gee, who, instead of directly ruling on the case, pleaded the two sides to come to a settlement; the two sides did after months of negotiation.
For the movie itself, the story has been confirmed to take place in the "Forgotten Realms" worlds in the D&D multiverse. This means that fans should expect a darker, more serious tone compared to the previous movies.
Not much else is known about the film save that "Orphan" and "Wrath of the Titans" screenwriter David Leslie Johnson has already written the script for the film and that Brian Goldner and Steven Davis from Hasbro and Courtney Solomon and Allan Zeman from Sweatpea are set to produce.