Ryan Reynolds has found his next quest.
Reynolds is in talks to star in and produce a live-action feature adaptation of Dragon’s Lair, one of the most iconic arcade video games from the 1980s.
Heat Vision breakdown
After almost a year of negotiations, Netflix has closed a deal to pick up the rights to the game. Roy Lee will produce via his Vertigo Entertainment with Trevor Engelson of Underground Films. Don Bluth, Gary Goldman and Jon Pomeroy are also producing. Reynolds will produce via his banner, Maximum Effort.
Dan and Kevin Hageman, who worked on The Lego Movie and most recently Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, will write the script.
Lair was, at one point, the most popular game in America. It hit the scene in 1983 and promised to revolutionize the arcade industry with its movie-style animation that hailed from Bluth, who would later go on to direct animated movies An American Tail and All Dogs Go to Heaven, and its envelope-pushing technology that used LaserDisc to advance the story. While the game’s high point faded as its style didn’t take off, it remains fondly remembered and even made an appearance in the '80s-set Stranger Things.
The plot of the video game is epic in scope: a knight named Dirk the Daring must rescue the fetching Princess Daphne from the clutches of the evil dragon known as Singe and the wizard Mordroc.
Lee was a producer on last year’s Stephen King adaptation, It Chapter Two, while his company worked on another King adaptation, Doctor Sleep. Engelson was a producer on Snowfall.
The Hagemans are currently the showrunners and exec producers of Nickelodeon's Star Trek animated series and wrote the upcoming animated feature The Croods 2, which features Reynolds as one of the voice stars. The brothers are repped by Underground and law firm Hansen Jacobson.
This marks the third project with Netflix for Reynolds, with the actor coming off the December unveiling of action movie 6 Underground and currently shooting Netflix's action movie Red Notice with Gal Gadot and Dwayne Johnson. It’s his second video game-themed feature; Reynolds next stars in Free Guy, which tells of a man who realizes he is a background character in a video game. The movie is currently scheduled to open in July, although the novel coronavirus crisis may postpone it.
Reynolds is also due to be seen this year in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard with Samuel L. Jackson and Salma Hayek, and heard in DreamWorks’ Croods 2, which opens December.
He is repped by WME and Sloane Offer.
