Five years of scripts, pitches and patience ended the way most Hollywood fantasy projects do: not with a cancellation letter, but with a quiet changing of the guard. The executives who championed Joe Manganiello’s live-action Dragonlance series moved on, and suddenly, as the actor puts it, the project had become “nobody’s child”.
Speaking to IGN at Lucca Comics and Games 2026, Manganiello — one of the most famous Dungeons & Dragons players in Hollywood — walked through exactly how the adaptation fell apart, and why he now believes there is “new hope” for the world of Krynn to reach the screen.
How Five Years of Work Became Nobody’s Child
Manganiello was hired as showrunner and screenwriter by Michael Lombardo, his former boss at HBO, who had moved into the top job at Entertainment One. The brief, in the actor’s telling, was gloriously blunt: create the next Game of Thrones. Dragonlance — the novel and tabletop setting that first introduced him to role-playing — was the vehicle.
Then the corporate ground shifted. Leadership changes and internal shuffling at Entertainment One left both the series and Manganiello’s separate D&D documentary orphaned. Lombardo, “the guy who understood my pitch”, was gone. His producing partner was gone too. “The two people that I was there with are gone, and the people there had different ideas,” he explained. With the adaptation officially confirmed canned in 2024, the actor admitted he briefly thought: “OK, I’m out.”
New Hope Under Dan Ayoub
What changed his mind was a personnel move fans of the tabletop franchise will recognise. Dan Ayoub — former senior vice president of Dungeons & Dragons — took over as president of Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro Digital Games just four days before Manganiello’s interview, consolidating books, games, film and television under a single franchise umbrella.
“The dream was always, always to be off running a Dragonlance series, and I will never give up hope on that. And I think there’s a lot of people that share that vision.”
“Dan Ayoub is a fantastic leader. He gets it, and we work really well together,” Manganiello continued, adding that he expects the pair to “do some amazing things together”. The signals from the community side match: Dragonlance Nexus recently photographed original novelists Margaret Weis and Tracy and Laura Hickman alongside Ayoub, the kind of gathering that rarely happens without intent.
Key point: Nothing has been greenlit. Manganiello’s comments reflect personal commitment and a warmer relationship with the rights-holders — not an official confirmation that a Dragonlance TV show is back in development.
The timing matters. Under the new franchise model, every arm of Dungeons & Dragons — books, games, film and television — reports through one office, which is precisely the structure the Entertainment One version of Dragonlance lacked. Ayoub himself has talked up the change in near-messianic terms: “The impact here cannot be overstated; this is massive for D&D and will allow a strong, coordinated, and well-funded approach for the franchise.”
The Documentary May Arrive First
There is a second, faster-moving thread. Manganiello revealed that his long-gestating Dungeons & Dragons documentary, also stalled during the Entertainment One upheaval, is “actually going to be closer to getting out” under the new regime — potentially giving fans a first on-screen result from the partnership well before any scripted series finds a home.
What It Would Mean for D&D on Screen
The stakes are bigger than one actor’s passion project. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves landed in 2023 to warm reviews and a decidedly cool box office, and a sequel script has reportedly been circling ever since. Television remains the untested frontier — no D&D series has ever made it to air.
Ayoub is no stranger to the community either — before Hasbro he built his reputation at 343 Industries around Halo, and since taking the D&D job roughly a year ago he has overseen the franchise’s expansion into crossovers and licensed tie-ins at a pace fans have not seen in decades.
Dragonlance would be a bold first swing: a sprawling, novel-driven saga of dragon armies, doomed twins and a cursed black blade, with four decades of source material behind it. For now it exists in what one observer called suspended animation — alive in Manganiello’s hands, waiting on corporate priorities to align. Five years of work already went into the last attempt. If Ayoub’s presidency delivers what the actor believes it can, none of it may have been wasted.
