Netflix just rolled for initiative on Dungeons & Dragons, and the die landed on vampires.
The streamer has ordered a live-action series called Ravenloft, built around the backstory of Darklord Strahd von Zarovich, the vampire villain who anchors the Ravenloft setting. Alfonso Cuarón is attached as an executive producer. So is John August, who is also writing the series.
That’s a gothic fantasy pitch with a real filmmaker’s name on it, which is more than most tabletop adaptations get.
Cuarón has been here before
This isn't his first job for Netflix. He wrote and directed Roma for the service in 2018, and it was met with critical acclaim.
Executive producer is a looser credit than writer-director, though, and it’s fair to want more. Having Cuarón point those particular skills at Strahd would have been the more interesting version of this announcement.
August is a reasonable consolation. He’s written screenplays for Tim Burton projects including Big Fish and Corpse Bride, which is a useful résumé for a story about a castle, a curse and a man who can’t die.
Why this feels familiar
You could be forgiven for thinking you’d already heard about a D&D adaptation. There was a 2023 movie starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez and Regé-Jean Page. HBO is working on a Baldur’s Gate 3 show, which is close enough to a D&D expansion in video game form.
D&D is a sprawling, ever-expanding world. That’s a lot of what makes it work at the table, and it’s the same reason studios keep mining it: there’s always another corner of the map nobody has filmed yet.
The pick matters more than the platform
Ravenloft is a smarter choice than another party-of-adventurers romp. Strahd is a specific character with a specific tragedy behind him, not a genre. A series about his backstory has somewhere to go that a quest structure doesn’t.
Whether Netflix treats it that way is the open question. For now, the credits are the strongest thing about it, and Cuarón’s name is doing the heaviest lifting.
