Hugh Grant to bully some nerds as the villain in new Dungeons & Dragons movie
According to Deadline, Hugh Grant and Sophia Lillis (Beverly Marsh from It) have boarded the new Dungeons & Dragons movie, joining Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Justice Smith, and Regé-Jean Page. Paramount and eOne, which are putting out this movie, still haven’t put out any plot details, meaning we still don’t know if it’s a straight-up fantasy movie based on D&D lore or if it’s some kind of Jumanji thing where real people get transported to a fictional world, but we intend to keep complaining about it in these news stories until the studios decide to provide more details.
As for these new hires, Deadline doesn’t know who Lillis will be playing, but its sources are confident that Hugh Grant will be “the film’s antagonist.” Without any plot details to go off of, we’d have to guess that that means he’ll be playing the cool older brother of Chris Pine’s dorky nerd protagonist, and at some point Grant and his mean jock friends will go down into the basement where Pine and his nerd friends are playing D&D and make fun of them. Mean jock Hugh Grant will say something brutal in his charming accent, like, “Oh, you’re playing with elves and stuff, get some real friends!” and then Chris Pine will say “I have real friends, we’re playing D&D and it’s actually considered cool these days and they’re making a new movie about it,” but Hugh Grant won’t listen because he’ll be stealing some of their dad’s beers and taking them to a party.
Dungeons & Dragons is being written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, who previously made Game Night with Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman. That was kind of a high-concept comedy about games, so it seems likely that there will be something wackier going on here than just people with swords, but again, we do not know.