• John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein wrote and directed “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”

• The directors told Insider achieving the right balance of humor was a challenge.

• “If you go too funny, too silly with it, it becomes a spoof,” Daley told Insider.

“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” is a sweeping, fun-filled adventure that takes the best elements of the beloved game and brings them to the big screen. But it could have easily been a ho-hum heist film, directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein told Insider.

At the film’s Los Angeles premiere on March 26, Daley and Goldstein revealed they were acutely aware that previous attempts at turning the role-playing game into a film had turned out poorly. The 2000 film “Dungeons & Dragons,” for instance, which included Jeremy Irons and Thora Birch in its cast, has a 10% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It flopped with audiences, bringing in just $33.9 million at the global box office, according to Box Office Mojo.

“There’s a large part of the viewing public that sees a title like that or a medieval setting and just checks out, thinking it’s not for them,” Goldstein explained. “We had to overcome that bias from the start.”

Daley and Goldstein, who previously worked together on the 2015 adventure comedy “Vacation” and the 2018 comedy “Game Night,” collaborated with writer Michael Gilio to revise an existing screenplay and infuse it with charismatic characters, spry humor, and an irreverent tone. This reimagined film follows Edgin Davis (Chris Pine) and a ragtag band of small-time criminals on a quest to find a resurrection tablet that would bring his deceased wife back to life.

“The existing script was a heist film, and it would have been the most generic film in the world if it had that old tone, because what I think is so specific about ‘D&D’ and allows us to tell a different story in a different way is that that tone — and the fact that even the monsters, the creatures, and the locations are all so bizarre and different from what you might think of as normal in the fantasy space,” Daley said.

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Selling one or two of cast members — namely Hugh Grant — on the film wasn’t an easy task initially.

“When Hugh Grant was sent the script, he said, ‘Oh, Dungeons & Dragons. That’s not for me,'” Daley recalled. “But his agent pushed him to give it a read. He read it and then he saw I think what was so genuine about it, and that’s what got him excited — that tone.”

The screenplay underwent numerous rewrites to strike that tone, which has quickly become the film’s trademark with audiences.

“If you go too funny, too silly with it, it becomes a spoof, and then the stakes don’t matter anymore,” Daley added. “And we really wanted to find that balance. They’re fun, but also keeping people really rooted.”

As production on the film approached, Goldstein and Dailey continued to revise the screenplay to adapt to its stars.

“As we were finding our cast, we were able to tailor it to their voices in a way that was really special, and it’s something that we have the benefit of being able to do as writer-directors,” Daley said.

Goldstein and Daley appear to have pulled it off. “Dungeons & Dragons” currently has a 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and generated $71.5 million at the global box office over the weekend, according to Paramount, which bodes well for the film’s theatrical run and the possibility of a sequel.

Read the original article on Insider