Their brand that revolves around players sending their characters off on adventures to kill things and loot their bodies?
In fairness, Hasbro has a recent history of making spectacularly stupid decisions with the D&D brand.
I noticed the same thing about the axe (she’s all impressed with it coming out of the fire but… nothing comes of it) and my best guess is trying to make it a “family” action/adventure movie. Few people will refuse to see it because it’s not bloody enough but if people talk about gore, it’ll turn a number of people off.
That’s exactly why it matters.
It has had a rocky reputation over the years, and showing a story that revolves around family, heroism, and humor while keeping the graphic violence to a minimum helps blunt some of the criticism.
Note also the lack of anything demonic, or pagan. No clerics calling to weird gods, no summoning of fiends from the infernal realms. Necromancy is a more palatable type of evil power, since it is icky without being religious. Even the paladin is just a guy with a cool sword that glows. And of course, clerics just don’t exist.
I think some image consultants were involved in this screenplay at some stage. I think it’s remarkable that in light of all that, it still felt very D&D-ish, and was also a fun movie.
Killing someone with an axe would look absolutely brutal, there is no way they could have something like that in anything short of R rated. It’s very different than stabbing someone with a sword.
This is just an ongoing trend. When I started way back in 1989, AD&D 2nd edition, Clerics had to worship certain gods in order to have access to certain spell domains. You could worship some nebulous concepts like Good, but you still had to make a choice to have access to certain spells. Starting with 3rd edition (I think), a cleric no longer had to have any connection to a deity in order to have access to their spells. In fact, they could flat out renounce their deity and still have access to all their spells. The same is true of the Paladin these days. They don’t really have to be connected to a deity. They can be, but that’s a player’s choice rather than something required by thea rules.
I don’t think anyone wanted graphic violence in a D&D movie. But it does look rather silly to have people running around with these weapons that somehow never get used for what they were designed to be used for. It’s like watching the old GI Joe cartoons or the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.
It wasn’t 3rd or 3.5 unless it was some kind of alternate rule set, or a campaign setting like Dark Sun.
Speaking of which, the film took place in the Forgotten Realms which has a diverse and powerful pantheon. Ignoring it was a deliberate choice.
Still, they presumably decided “no realistic injuries” as a benchmark. They could have just as easily given her a big hammer or mace or club if they thought the barrier was “axes are too messy”. She was able to have an axe because they were never going to depict true results.
Well, they did literally have the cast of the 80s D&D cartoon in there 
While I sort of noticed the lack of bloodshed at the time, I can’t say it diminished my enjoyment any. Wasn’t that kind of movie.
I can see them not wanting the heroes to use an axe on human(oid)s, but using an axe against a monster wouldn’t be so bad. Especially not a monster so large that even a brutal axe wound would plausibly only slow it down, like a dragon.
It didn’t diminish my enjoyment either. I don’t regret the matinee money or the time I spent to watch it and I’d go see a sequel if they actually made one.
I’m hoping there’s a good commentary on the DVD
I don’t agree. It is easy to film a killing blow from an axe without showing the gaping wound and flailing entrails. Just have the killee with her back to the camera etc. etc. A sword thrust under these conditions is more graphic.
I just watched it on Netflix. I really liked it, but I think I would have liked it even more as a limited series; it felt a teensy bit over-stuffed as a film.
It would have done well as a series that gave each character and the world more detail and story.
I didn’t think of it before, but yes that would have been better. I suppose the budget for such a series might be high and Vox Machina already exists, but I’d watch it (provided I don’t have to sign up to a new service to get it).
I laughed when they kept asking the sorcerer “But can’t you just use magic to do it?”
I’m sure Hasbro would love to have a miniseries or streaming series, etc but was using this film as a test bed to gauge interest. As I understand it, they were in discussion about it even before the film released. I don’t know enough about Hollywood to guess at whether the film’s success or lack thereof means for a future series – I’ve seen worse movies get sequels.
I think the whole thing was that he was NOT a fighter, and that he basically fast-talked his way out of trouble, but I do agree that he should have had something more than a reinforced musical instrument- maybe a dagger, or a club or something else that’s not a serious melee class weapon.
I thought the director did a fantastic job of portraying the ad-hoc nature of D&D plans- things always go sideways, there’s always some sort of “oh shit!” moment when something fails spectacularly and the party has to pivot and figure it out, and so forth. There was all that and more in the movie, although I wasn’t watching it with that in mind- I had to remember the movie in the context of it being a D&D party and imagine what had happened in certain situations. That made it even funnier.
As someone who has played RPGs for decades, that bothered me. If someone created a character in D&D or a similar game and said, “Oh my character doesn’t fight, he talks himself out of problems,” I’d say that’s not how the game works.
That’s why I said he came across to me as an NPC, even though he’s supposedly the protagonist. If I didn’t have experience with gaming, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me at all.
He fights in the last battle though, doesn’t he?