Tabletop Television Turmoil: Live Action 'D&D' Series Not Going Forward At Paramount+; Netflix 'Magic: The Gathering' Toon Scrapped
One campaign will change strategy, the other completely over
Creative differences, languishing development, and the TV crunch have hit television adaptations of the two biggest tabletop role playing games in the world. Hasbro’s Dungeons & Dragons, which had a live action series set up at Paramount+ has now been sent elsewhere, while Netflix’s long-in-development animated Magic: The Gathering series has been straight up canceled.
Dungeons & Dragons had been given a straight-to-series order with an eight-episode first season back in January 2023, but creative differences have resulted in Paramount+ dropping the series. Dodgeball and We’re the Millers director Rawson Marshall Thurber wrote the original pilot and was to stay on as director, while WeCrashed co-creator Drew Crevello was serving as showrunner. It has been sent back into redevelopment without any of who was working on it before, so it’ll be doing so with an entirely new creative team. Once it’s figured out, it will be shopped around again. Sure sounds familiar.
'Power Rangers' Reboot Series Not Going Forward At Netflix
Sometimes when it’s too quiet, it’s a developmental regression to non-verbal, but Angel Grove High never dies. The Power Rangers reboot series that has been in development for two years at Netflix, ending original continuity after 30 years along the way, is no more. Not only is the series no longer going forward at the streamer, but it is headed for cre…
As for Magic the Gathering, the animated series that had been set up at Netflix in 2019 and originally scheduled to premiere in 2022 has been canceled, and seemingly rather quietly. It had to come from its only announced star, Arrowverse and Chuck alum Brandon Routh, whose participation was revealed in 2021. He was being interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival for his new film Ick, and was asked about the show’s status. The response was rather defeating: "I'm not sure. I did do a voice for it. As far as I understand, nobody's put out a press release about it, but apparently it's not happening. That's kind of old news. I'm not sure why it's surfacing again." So the series had been dead for a while. Routh was to voice Gideon Jura, a noble Planeswalker and one of the game's most recognizable heroes. It had apparently been fully written and recorded, the series is believed to be a casualty of Netflix’s cutbacks but I’m not so sure the timing is where source claims it is, and it’s unclear whether Hasbro’s sale of eOne to Lionsgate factors.
The series did go through its own creative overhaul, with its last team being led by Jeff Kline, whose work includes Jackie Chan Adventures, Men in Black: The Animated Series, Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, Godzilla: The Series, Extreme Ghostbusters and Transformers Prime. The team included Transformers franchise veteran Nicole Dubuc as a writer, co-executive producer and story editor Steve Melching, supervising director Audu Paden, art director Izzy Medrano, and other writers Russell Sommer, Dan Frey, and Taneka Stotts. The previous team had Joe and Anthony Russo as producers, with animation veteran Henry Gilroy and Jose Molina, who wrote 2 episodes of Agent Carter among dozens of shows where he was a writer and either co-executive producer or story editor over the past 25 years, as head writers.
'Pokémon Horizons' Resumes Its Hero Work In Fourth Arc “Rayquaza Rising”, Coming In October
I see “Rayquaza Rising”, I see Kitakami on the way? Around here, coverage of Pokémon Horizons has usually kept to when the dub gets a new batch announced on Netflix. With everything it’s a lot to make room for episode title announcements and plot developments by episode. But Friday’s news surrounding imminent progression in its home country of Japan gav…
Paramount + and Netflix: "Fuck you, geeks."