Jonathan Goldstein revealed at San Diego Comic-Con that he and John Francis Daley have delivered a screenplay for a Dungeons & Dragons sequel, hired to write it after Honor Among Thieves underwhelmed at the box office. “I don’t know that it will see the light of day for a number of financial reasons,” Goldstein said, adding that such films remain expensive to produce despite the fan enthusiasm the first movie generated.
Jonathan Goldstein has a script sitting in a drawer, and he’d love nothing more than to see it produced. At San Diego Comic-Con, the co-writer and co-director of ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ confirmed that he and John Francis Daley finished a sequel screenplay a while back, cast and all. Nobody’s greenlit it, and the reason comes down to cold math. “We were hired to write it, I don’t know that it will see the light of day for a number of financial reasons,” Goldstein admitted, a line that turns a beloved fantasy franchise into another cautionary tale about sequels that exist only on paper.
A sequel penned but shelved
At San Diego Comic-Con this July, Jonathan Goldstein, co-writer and co-director of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, told ScreenRant that a follow-up already exists on paper. “We actually wrote a sequel to Dungeons & Dragons. We were hired to write it,” he said, before adding: “I don’t know that it will see the light of day for a number of financial reasons.”
Loved by fans, punished by the numbers
The 2023 film, directed by Goldstein and his longtime collaborator John Francis Daley (the duo behind Vacation and Game Night), remains a rare case of a video game and tabletop adaptation winning over both camps. It holds a 91% critics rating and a 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
The movie grossed $205.46 million worldwide against an estimated $150 million production budget shared by Paramount Pictures and Hasbro’s subsidiary Entertainment One. For a tentpole of that size, the math simply did not close. “They’re expensive movies to make, but it’d be great fun to do it,” Goldstein admitted. “We love that cast, and we think we wrote something that fans would like.”
A franchise that keeps rolling elsewhere
The big screen may be blocked, but the property is far from dormant. A live-action series created by Rawson Marshall Thurber was ordered by Paramount+ in 2023, then dropped by the streamer the following year. Netflix has since picked up a separate live-action show, The Forgotten Realms, from Shawn Levy and Drew Crevello. That trajectory marks real progress for a brand whose first live-action film, released in 2000, earned just $33 million worldwide on a $45 million budget, with two follow-ups relegated to Syfy in 2005 and 2012.
Goldstein and Daley move on, for now
Neither Paramount nor Hasbro has publicly confirmed or denied the sequel’s future, and no returning cast members have been officially named beyond Goldstein’s nod to the original ensemble. In the meantime, the directing duo has a full slate: they are set to helm Renegades, an action thriller based on a short story by Will Simmons, and are developing the next Star Trek film for Paramount. The finished Dungeons & Dragons script, delivered under a paid studio assignment, sits in a drawer waiting for the numbers to change.