I find this
new plan of WotC's to be deeply unappealing. I'm also pretty skeptical they will pull it off.
Dark Sun movie in particular cannot be done well without taking the kinds of risks that WotC seems extremely averse to--and even if they take the risk, what is being described here already isn't doing DS properly. It needs Chris Nolan, and this is more like Joel Schumacher.
It would be possible to do a movie version of Eberron that wouldn't totally suck. If they try to do noir, it will suck. If they go pulp, they have a shot. My guess is they will fail to do the setting justice. The best case scenario is if they adapt some of the good novels. One series in particular would be a very good starting platform. What I expect instead is they will try to cram in as many "cool" elements as they can without really caring how they fit together. Because what Bladerunner really needed was halflings riding dinosaurs and a train heist. /s
EDIT: If you really wanted to do a good Eberron noir movie, you would try to channel
The Third Man. Throneport is basically Berlin immediately after WW2.
The Maltese Falcon would also be a fit, but it would require real skill to make the noir detective not come off as a cliche.
Bladerunner has the right vibe. So does
Chinatown. But you could
blatantly rip off do an homage to The Third Man without making significant changes.
Forgotten Realms? The last D&D movie was in the FR, this is not anything new. For source materials, I haven't read any of Salvatore's novels, but that drow ranger gets a lot of attention, I bet they go with it. Greenwood's novels are trash. I picked up a few once, figuring they would be your standard amateur novelist fare, but they fell considerably short of that measure. I read one, the first quarter of another, then donated all of them.
The Dragonlance Chronicles benefit from the fact that they pretty much started out as fiction, with the actual game being an afterthought. So we already know what they will be, without the torment of watching them (the first module was
so painful to read). (Still considerably better writers than Greenwood, though. Greenwood sets the bar
low.)
Star Wars/D&D crossover? Not for me. WoW crossover? Why wouldn't they just make it a setting using D&D rules? Or maybe that's what they mean by "crossover"? But it wouldn't work for Star Wars, there are no modern D&D rules capable of handling ship-to-ship battles.
No surprise that the idea for the crossovers comes from something that worked with MtG. Hasbro consistently does not understand why the two games don't respond in the same way to the same design/marketing strategies.
5e was fine. Bland, but fine, and some of the APs look worth running, if you are into APs. D&D 2024? Meh. The new Eberron book (
Forge of the Artificer) was as useful as a near-the-end-of-the-edition 2e or 3e splatbook; I was initially annoyed that some of the pages were glued together, but when I pried them apart I saw I hadn't missed much. It's billed as a complement to the prior Eberron book (
Rising from the Last War), which is true only in the sense that if you don't have RftLW you don't have anything.
