Why does WotC insist on making "Dungeons and Dragons" branded stuff, instead of, for example, "The Legend of Drizzt", or something?
I'm not going to fight about which particular famous D&D characters you would want to see in a movie, I picked Drizzt because he's probably still about the most famous one these days, but my point is... Why do we keep getting generic "D&D" movies with random shlubs we don't have any investment in, that invariably suck because a D&D campaign itself doesn't really make for a good movie, and end up just being giant flops for WotC?
I know there was that god-awful animated Dragonlance movie back ~15 years ago, that as far as I can tell had the animation budget for a movie about a quarter as long as what it ultimately was, so as a result was just a hot mess from a production standpoint, and yeah, I know given what's' happened in the last few years the chance of WotC ever making any media with the Dragonlance name on it is about zero, but beyond that D&D movies never seem to take advantage of the stable of IP they already have. Make a Drizzt movie. Make a movie about Strahd. Make a movie about frickin' Elminster, even.
It's like if Marvel studios just decided to make "A Superhero Movie", as opposed to an Iron Man or Thor movie. You *can* make an original IP superhero, you can even make a movie about them... But it's an uphill battle, when you've already got developed, fleshed out characters that have a built-in audience.
Is it just that they don't want to have to pay a percentage to the authors who came up with the characters, or what?