Could a new Dungeons & Dragons movie repeat the magic of The Lord of the Rings?

Answer: Of course not. “Sadly the evidence suggests the opposite. A succession of terrible fantasy efforts, from Eragon, to Duncan Jones’s Warcraft, have left fans of the genre flailing in the swamps of despair over the past 20 years. Let us not even mention Uwe Boll’s execrable, Jason Statham-led In the Name of the King from 2007. Even Jackson struggled to repeat his own trick with The Hobbit, a misguided attempt to film Tolkien’s fleet-footed and folksy fable as a LOTR-style epic trilogy. Quite how the Oscar-winning film-maker failed to realise that preposterous elf-dwarf romances and endless entirely superfluous action sequences were unlikely to convince audiences of the need to shoot a 304-page fable as an eight-hour fantasy mega-spectacle remains one of the most mystifying questions of recent times.”