Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves was a surprise at the box office, opening at $38.5 million in the United States and $33 million internationally, with a total gross of $123.5 million as of April 2023. Reception for the film has been glowing; Rotten Tomatoes reports that 90% of critics and 94% of users gave it positive reviews. The movie is an indisputable success—that is, until you look at it as a means of getting people interested in Dungeons & Dragons, the game.

That’s where things get a little bit trickier.

The barrier to entry can feel so high that, to the uninitiated, D&D just isn’t worth getting into.

There’s no question that Wizards of the Coast—the Hasbro division that owns and publishes Dungeons & Dragons—intended for the film to be a marketing tool for the game on which it was based. It’s a time-honored tradition for companies to turn to Hollywood to grow their brand. We’ve seen it in hundreds of pop culture adaptations on the big screen, from 1987’s Masters of the Universe to 2014’s The Lego Movie. Even Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Barbie isn’t immune from the ulterior motives of big business.

The big difference between Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and most other projects like it is that it isn’t technically selling a product to its audience; it’s selling a long-term commitment.

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a complex experience that requires learning several books’ worth of rules, and games can take several sessions spread across months to finish. It demands that its players agree to social contracts that not only facilitate a smoother game, but also ensure that they’ll have no qualms seeing each other on a regular basis for a large chunk of the year.

The barrier to entry can feel so high that, to the uninitiated, D&D just isn’t worth getting into.

In this respect, Honor Among Thieves is a $150 million gamble. Is a party composed of Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis, Rege Jean-Page, and Hugh Grant enough to get people to actually play Dungeons & Dragons?

Dante, a longtime DM (“Dungeon Master”, or person who facilitates D&D games), found it effective enough.

“The movie didn’t just impress me; it rekindled my desire to run games again,” he says. “It successfully captured so many of the random quirks and gaffes that come up in sessions, and I especially related to how often the most serious moments could abruptly pivot into unintended slapstick. It was refreshing and inspiring in ways that I didn’t expect.”

For JR and Feanne, a couple who’d grown closer together over games of D&D, it was a different story. They enjoyed Honor Among Thieves well enough, but it didn’t quite inspire them in the way it did Dante.

“[The] movie was a LOT of fun. It balanced out a lot of the camp with a lot of unexpected laughs and heart,” JR shares. “It took so many of the tropes and both made fun [of] and respected them. Plus the action scenes were shockingly better than I would have given it credit for.”

“The film was lots of fun, though I personally would have loved for the comedy to be more NSFW a la The Legend of Vox Machina,” Feanne adds.

In regards to picking up the game, however, Jr says: “As a player of D&D, it didn’t make me want to play, but it definitely made me want to see more of this party.”

Jewel, who’s never played D&D, shares some of JR’s sentiments.

“I don’t play D&D and have no attachment to the franchise or the lore or the gameplay, so I went into this just as a moviegoer,” she explains. “I enjoyed it just fine. It was a fun adventure! The characters were funny! But that’s all it was. I didn’t make an emotional connection to any of the characters, and I wish I could have.”

“I didn’t want to dig into the source material because I already got the laughs, and without much emotional investment.”

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves doesn’t actually make a connection between what plays out onscreen and the actual gaming experience.

After seeing the film myself, I have to agree: the movie is an immensely enjoyable romp, but I don’t see it onboarding people into the game as much as Wizards of the Coast hopes it might. The cast’s tremendous onscreen chemistry can sometimes be difficult to replicate with a group of players crowded around a table. Some the film’s ridiculously fun action scenes will no doubt lead to disappointment when new players learn that many of their maneuvers go against the game’s rules. You’d be hard-pressed to find a DM who can ooze as much charm as Hugh Grant when he assumes the role of a duplicitous non-player character.

And even if you somehow manage to find that perfect mix of ingredients to make a D&D game just like the movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves doesn’t actually make a connection between what plays out onscreen and the actual gaming experience.

One of the reasons that some people attribute D&D’s recent spike in popularity to Stranger Things is because the latter shows its characters actually playing the game. The connection between game and media is much more explicit, making it easier for audiences to see the message between the lines: “Dungeons & Dungeons is good game, and you should give it a try.”

When you watch Honor Among Thieves‘ thrilling shapeshifter-driven escape sequence, you don’t stop to think about how much fun someone is having playing Dungeons & Dragons. You’re just having a blast watching someone turn into different animals in order to run away from guards.

Compare that to the pivotal D&D scene in the fourth season of Stranger Things, where the players’ in-game survival comes down to one final roll of the dice. Eddie Munson’s spellbinding narration, the utter dread felt when Vecna makes his in-game appearance, the tension building between players as they argue about their collective fight-or-flight response—everything that makes Dungeons & Dragons such an enduring game is on full display.

As Eddie himself says: “That’s why we play!” Unfortunately, “that” is absent from the movie.

This doesn’t necessarily make Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves a failure—far from it. The movie is, again, an indisputable success. However, it does more for Dungeons & Dragons as a franchise rather than as a game. It’s effective in getting people interested in its world and its creatures, and in the magic of it all. It’s just that it might have a minimal effect on getting people to actually play the game that world and its creatures come from.

And that’s not a bad thing. With a brand as large and as established as Dungeons & Dragons, you can do far worse than put out a fan-favorite movie.

In terms of getting people into the game itself, there’s already a wealth of material out there, much of which was created by life-long fans of D&D. Stranger Things was just one of the more mainstream contributors to the game’s rise in popularity. The real reason the game has become so much bigger in recent years was because of its community.

Podcasts like Critical Role (which originated the aforementioned The Legend of Vox Machina), Dungeons & Daddies, and Not Another D&D Podcast have long been showing audiences how fun the game can be simply by broadcasting their adventures, along with countless independent streamers on Twitch. DMs in game stores and online communities like Reddit are constantly opening their games to first-time players, acting as their safe and friendly guides to the world of role-playing.

Even Wizards of the Coast has made strides in making the game more welcoming to new players, despite recent bumbles in that department. Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, released in mid-2022, is the first D&D sourcebook to feature adventures from a diverse-by-design group of writers, including one by a Filipino. Opening up its decades of rich lore to creators and players of all backgrounds helps make it a game for everyone.

All of this goes to show that Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves doesn’t actually have to bring people into the game; it just needed to be a good movie.

What really brings people to D&D the game, it turns out, is other people who just want to share their love for it.