Rights Battle On ‘Dungeons & Dragons’: Warner Bros and Universal/Hasbro Tangle

EXCLUSIVE: Yesterday, I broke a story about Warner Bros making big plans on a live-action feature based on the role-playing fantasy game fixture Dungeons & Dragons. Not so fast, says Hasbro, which claims that it owns the rights to D&D, and that the toymaker company has set up the project at Universal to be developed as a directing vehicle by Chris Morgan, the scribe behind the last five films in The Fast And The Furious franchise (including the upcoming Fast 6) and 47 Ronin.

Well, nobody is commenting for the record at Warner Bros, but I can tell you the studio isn’t backing down from its plans to move forward on a project that already has a completed script by Wrath Of The Titans scribe David Leslie Johnson, with Roy Lee producing alongside Courtney Solomon. Solomon actually directed the 2000 feature based on the billion-dollar fantasy game. Hasbro spokesman Wayne Charness said that “Hasbro owns the intellectual property rights to Dungeons & Dragons, period, because of Hasbro’s acquisition of Wizards Of The Coast in 1998.” Insiders on the other project maintain this has come up before, and that in a binding arbitration decision, Solomon prevailed and was proven to hold the underlying rights necessary to make the Warner Bros movie possible.

What does all of this mean? Before the fantasy mayhem and sword battles of Dungeons & Dragons gets depicted on the screen, there’s a good chance that a bunch of balding lawyers wearing glasses will face off in an arbitration hearing battle. And really, isn’t that in keeping with the spirit of a fantasy game that has captured the passion of glasses-wearing balding geeks since 1974? Fellas, to steal a phrase from another geek franchise fave Highlander, there can be only one, so have at it.