rolling the dice

Joe Manganiello Wrote a Draft for His Very Own Dungeons & Dragons Movie

Joe Manganiello. Photo: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

D&D enthusiast Joe Manganiello has embarked on his most daring campaign yet. Appearing on MTV’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, Manganiello revealed that he is angling to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie, so hard that he’s already co-written a script for one with a playwright friend from Carnegie Mellon. He also shared that he met with Wizards of the Coast, D&D’s publisher, about “where [the film] could go, what it should look like, and what it should be.” In Manganiello’s vision, “Obviously, there’s a spectacle. There’s dragons breathing fire and lightning … But what makes a great superhero or fantasy movie is the human aspect. It’s got to be about something.” The actor says he’s “talking to all the right parties” about realizing his fantasy, but, if so, those parties have some confusing intel. As of last year, a different Dungeons & Dragons movie scripted by David Leslie Johnson, with Rob Letterman set to direct and Ansel Elgort in talks to star, was a major priority for Warner Bros. Either the studio is so busy fixing Batman that it forgot, or Manganiello is looking at Lindsay Lohan’s Mean Girls 2 treatment’s odds of fruition.

Joe Manganiello Wrote His Very Own Dungeons & Dragons Script