It’s just over a year since Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves hit theaters. The movie, directed jointly by Jonathan Goldstein (Spider-Man: Homecoming) and John Francis Daley (Freaks and Geeks), should naturally tick all the boxes for modern Hollywood success. It had a recognizable cast, including Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, Michelle Rodriguez, and Bradley Cooper (cameo). It had a huge budget. It was well-received by critics (91% on Rotten Tomatoes). It had source material from a beloved intellectual property – Dungeons and Dragons.
All the ingredients were there to make it a success, yet it wasn’t in monetary terms. The movie took over $200 million at the box office. Not bad, until you consider the $150 million budget. Conventional wisdom now dictates that a blockbuster must make at least twice its budget to break even. “At least” is an important term there, as there are some suggestions that a movie of the budgetary size of Honor Among Thieves might need to make five or six times its production budget. So what went wrong? Or, perhaps a better question to ask is whether there was a problem with the movie or whether this is something that is a wider problem in Hollywood.
Honor Among Thieves Balanced Fandom with Broad Appeal
Let’s start with the movie first of all. Honor Among Thieves is not the greatest movie of all time, but it is very good, if not a little formulaic. It manages to capture the same kind of goofy charm and comedy as Guardians of the Galaxy, making the viewer root for the gang of oddballs who band together on screen. It also deftly does the Marvel trick of planting plenty of Easter Eggs in the content for true D&D fans. D&D lore has been built up over the years, ranging from the different classes of D&D characters to the different planes of the multiverse. Honor Among Thieves touched on enough of that lore to satisfy hardcore D&D fans.
Perhaps Honor Among Thieves simply did not do enough to capture the attention of the estimated 50 million D&D players around the globe. Maybe it got unlucky with the timing of the release, going up against John Wick: Chapter 4, the Super Mario Bros. Movie, and Scream VI. Of course, there could also be something unquantifiable about its appeal. The Shawshank Redemption, Blade Runner, and David Fincher’s Fight Club are other examples of stellar movies that flopped despite getting good reviews, and Honor Among Thieves is not in their league.
Streaming Is Contributing to Decline in Theater Goers
However, there may be a broader argument about the changing dynamics of Hollywood. Many of us would have been comfortable with waiting for Honor Among Thieves to land on a streaming platform, for instance. Studies have shown that attendance is dropping in the US (most studies compare with 2019, i.e., before the pandemic), showing an overall decline in the number of adults who go to the theater at least once a year, falling to 57% in 2023. That number is key as it highlights a huge problem: Regular movie-goer numbers (people who usually go at least once a month) have remained quite steady over recent years; it is the infrequent goers that have plummeted in numbers. It is the latter group that would send a movie like Honor Among Thieves into profitability, and they decided to stay home.
We might also be experiencing an era of Marvel fatigue. Yes, D&D is not Marvel, but there are similarities in fantastical output. Disney has really struggled with generating profits with its post-pandemic Marvel movies, and the solution from CEO Bob Iger seems to be a future focus on quality ahead of quantity. The point here, though, is that Honor Among Thieves may have felt like more of an event had theaters not been saturated with fantasy and superhero movies over this past decade.
In the end, it feels like we are reaching a tipping point. On occasion, a movie or movies – think of Barbenheimer – can catch lightning in a bottle, but it feels that it is more difficult to predict the formula for success. Movie-going habits are evolving, and the industry must adapt to these changes to navigate this new landscape successfully. It’s not new to have a good blockbuster movie failing to make money, but there are new pressures like streaming services and spiraling costs. For Hollywood, it could get worse before it gets better.
