Forget 'Jumanji,' This Is Officially the Best Game-Based Film Ever Made

Published Jul 29, 2026, 6:22 PM EDT Erik Hawkins is an award-winning writer and editor who's been obsessed with cinema since he was old enough to hold Roger Ebert's Video Home Companion in his hands. He lives in NYC, where he rabidly watches everything from the newest releases to the more odd and obscure, and regularly shares his thoughts on Letterboxd. From ghost-writing fiction and webisodes in South America to local news, trial coverage, and politics in NYC, he's rarely put down his laptop over the past 15 years. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves defied all expectations when it was released in 2023, turning an adaptation of a 50-plus year-old tabletop property into a certified crowd-pleaser of a fantasy with a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and all it took were a few time-tested genre ingredients, executed well. Game Night writing-directing team Jon Goldstein and John Daley were gifted a cadre of almost supernaturally charismatic actors including Chris Pine and Hugh Grant, but most of all, the duo (unlike those who worked on some previous adaptations) recognized that D&D is not a story in itself to be adapted, but a world and rulebook within which to make your own. The film has since found a home in the hearts of thousands of genre fans and general audiences alike, with over 300,000 people rating it four stars or above on Letterboxd. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has also proven a streaming smash, as it's spent multiple weeks on Pluto TV's Top 10 list. Viewers who missed it in theaters can still stream it free there today. 'Honor Among Thieves' Won By Embracing The Heist Formula Image via Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection Goldstein and Daley were starting with a bit of a handicap when they were picked to adapt the Dungeons & Dragons property after a decade of studio wrangling and — even worse — the notoriously bad 2000 adaptation and its direct-to-video sequels. With the help of Pine's bard Edgin and Grant's villainous Forge, as well as a supporting cast of scene-stealers (chiefly Justice Smith's dopey sorcerer Simon and Regé-Jean Page's hysterically stoic paladin Xenk), the pair turned out a sprightly and smartly modern take on the tabletop world. With a focused story following a party embarking on a monumental journey, with various strengths and weaknesses on display, Honor Among Thieves hews closely to the modern heist movie template, much to its benefit. While a grand-scale adventure rife with palace intrigue and warring armies may instinctively make sense for a fantasy property, Goldstein and Daley smartly saw the Dungeons & Dragons world and system as a place for character interactions; for problems created and problems solved using the kind of ingenuity the players of a campaign would be expected to use. It's genuine fun watching our characters pass and fail various checks, to see named spells from the game casually thrown around, and class powers being used in the context of a medieval Oceans 11-style adventure. Hysterically, we even get a monstrous mimic chest, faithfully recreated from the lore. Pine's extremely modern performance style and wit could potentially grate, but instead, it proves a cracking counterpoint to the other members of the party, who are generally played straight. Even Grant's hilariously smarmy villain (with a scene-stealing, shit-eating grin) has a straight-laced counterpart in the sinister wizard Sofina. Hollywood Should Take Notes From 'D&D's Achievement Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves not only proved audiences still have an appetite for swashbuckling fantasy with a minimum of smirking (as seen in the recent, regrettable Masters of the Universe reboot); it should also serve as a template for future game and video game adaptations. Goldstein and Daley subtracted much of the postmodern chaff, unnecessary focus on lore and backstories, and ill-advised romance that many of today's adaptations are weighed down with. In place of them, the directors added genuine charm, visual sophistication, and a sense of humor. It's a fine line to walk, but Honor Among Thieves does it with aplomb, despite the large amounts of both CGI and jokes present. In addition to the superhuman charm exuded by its cast, the action sequences, while frenetic, recall nothing so much as the thrills Gore Verbinski brought to the screen with the equally unlikely hit Pirates of the Caribbean. Viewers raised on late-era Marvel slop and muddy, anonymous YA adaptations filled with endless lore are in for genuine refreshment with the film. Many of today's video game adaptations make the same mistakes the original Dungeons & Dragons film did. Slogs like the Timothy Olyphant-starring Hitman and Justin Kurzel's Assassin's Creed try so hard to translate the world of the game into familiar, usually grim blockbuster trappings that they forget to tell a fun story. If Hollywood takes notes from Goldstein and Daley's triumph here, future entries in the D&D world (and yes, there should be more) have incredible potential, but so do game adaptations in general. In fact, the writer-director pair would be the ideal team to finally bring the Hitman games to the big screen correctly — clockwork death machines and dry humor intact.