Yeah, IDK about that. Lighthearted and fun certainly has its place out there and can obviously work with D&D, but IDK about for Forgotten Realms. It's not leveraging the expansive setting to its strengths for storytelling and worldbuilding when it's being used for a comedy about meta-humor revolving around the gameplay and pop-culture identity of D&D.
Forgotten Realms very easily *could* be a serious lotr-style epic, so IMO it's kinda disappointing to see it exploited in a very surface-level manner to chase popular cinematic trends, no matter how well executed.
I think a full length film only works for a setting like D&D if you keep it light hearted, because you have a LOT of information to introduce.
GoT worked because it was a series and they could spend most of the time doing worldbuilding and character building so they had a LOT of time to draw the audience in with that information before delving into magic.
Previous D&D films failed because they took themselves too seriously and thought that would allow them to reach general audiences. You end up with an exposition problem, so either you find a fun way to make exposition work or you bore your audience to tears.
LOTR worked because it spent most of its time grounding itself in character building and worldbuilding through non-dialogue. It focused on a story it was telling, not explaining everything - where explanation was required it used the visual medium to do it.
So it comes down to this - in any D&D story you are going to have an exposition problem that you need to solve. If you fail to solve it then your movie/series will flop.
