Paramount Skydance turned down financing for John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s completed sequel to Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Hasbro still believes in the project and is actively looking for another studio to make it happen. The timing is worth sitting with, because the same week this news broke, Daley and Goldstein were doing press for their next Paramount tentpole, a Star Trek reboot, and telling reporters they don’t particularly care about winning over the franchise’s existing fans.
An insider at Paramount Skydance describes the studio’s relationship with the two directors in glowing terms: they love Daley and Goldstein, and the duo can pretty much do whatever they want there. That makes Paramount’s pass on the D&D sequel harder to square. Honor Among Thieves earned a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes and an A- CinemaScore in 2023, strong marks for a game adaptation. It opened to $38.5 million domestic and $71.5 million worldwide against a $150 million budget, finishing its run around $208 million globally. Industry analysts pegged the film’s break-even point closer to $493 million once marketing and theatrical splits were factored in, which made it a financial disappointment despite the reviews.
Daley has an explanation for what went wrong. “It was very much a product of not-so-great timing when the first movie came out,” he said. “It came out four days before the Super Mario movie, which broke records. It came out a month after Wizards of the Coast changed the official gaming license, prompting many D&D fans to boycott the game, and I don’t think the marketing did enough to tell people who weren’t already fans that this movie might be for them. Yeah, so it was a perfect storm of all of those elements, and we’ll see.”
Goldstein confirmed Hasbro hasn’t given up on a sequel, even with Paramount out of the picture. “Yeah, absolutely,” he said when asked if anyone was still trying to make the economics work. “I think Hasbro is a big believer in it, and if they can figure out a studio partner to make it work, they’ll want to proceed. As are our producers.” Daley added: “I mean, look, it’s something that is near and dear to our hearts in that we loved making the first one. We fell in love with the characters, and there’s so much potential in a sequel because the first act isn’t filled with exposition or introduction to this family that we’ve already become accustomed to. So you can kind of launch right into the story, which is really nice. Yes, there are practical realities with the finance contingent, and who knows if it ever gets made, but we were proud of the sequel script and hope that at some point it does find a path.”
While Hasbro shops that script around, Daley and Goldstein are moving forward on Paramount’s Star Trek reboot, confirmed as their assignment since November 2025. The pitch is a ground-up rebuild: all-new characters, no connection to the Kelvin timeline, and a tone borrowed from two Denzel Washington films. “Two movies we cite as comps for what we’re hoping to do are Training Day and Crimson Tide,” Goldstein said. Daley elaborated on the angle: “I would say it’s really kind of a look at the institution of Starfleet and any institution as a whole that has existed for a long time and what that does. I think the portrayal of Starfleet and the people that work within it have always been generally idealised versions of what the future could be. And while this isn’t a cynical or nihilistic take on it, I think it does acknowledge” the institution’s flaws. On the film’s structure, he added: “It takes place almost in real time, and it just is a whole other look at what a Star Trek movie could be without betraying the fundamentals of what it should be.”
Then came the comment that should worry longtime Trek fans more than any of the plot details. Asked directly about courting the franchise’s built-in audience, Goldstein said: “I mean, look, we don’t want to rely on fandom. We don’t want to just hope that there’s enough fans of the original [TOS] or The Next Generation or whatever who will turn out for this. We want to just make a great movie that lives in the world that people are familiar with, some people are familiar with, and that others will discover. And then, with good fortune, we launch a new franchise into existence.”
Star Trek hasn’t had a theatrical release since 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. A franchise that’s gone a decade without a movie doesn’t have the luxury of assuming casual audiences will show up in place of the fans who’ve kept it alive through that drought. The fans are the floor a project like this needs, not an audience to be politely deprioritized in favor of one that might not materialize.
Which brings the math back to an uncomfortable place. If Paramount trusts Daley and Goldstein enough to hand them a from-scratch Star Trek reboot with this kind of creative freedom, why did the studio let a finished, ready-to-shoot D&D script walk out the door over money, while Hasbro keeps trying to find it a home somewhere else? Either the “they can do whatever they want” trust has limits that kick in exactly when the budget gets uncomfortable, or the confidence in this creative team isn’t as unconditional as the framing suggests. Either way, Star Trek fans are now watching the studio’s chosen directors explain, on the record, why this next one isn’t really being built for them.
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