Oh, for sure! And we'll have to see if fans are still willing to turn out for the film - my feeling is that the timing was real bad for it from a marketing standpoint. A lot of the fans who might have otherwise been willing to turn out for the film are now going to still have that bad taste in their mouth.

They did, but my sense is the damage has already been done. There's been a lot of "too late" and "shown their true colors" chatter in the TTRPG sphere.

Well... it's kind of a long story, but in a nutshell, they retroactively changed their third party content creation rules to take a firmer hold on their IP, which would dick over a LOT of smaller third party creators in numerous ways. Fans were outraged. Third party content creators were outraged. Subscriptions to their new D&D Beyond service started to get cancelled so fast they shut down the site. They've since walked this back, but the damage has been done.

Well, the D&D fan-base has started to get heavily into the actual play model, and I feel that's what they were going with here. With successes like "Critical Role" and the like, you can do original characters in a familiar "D&D" setting, and the fans will buy in. They're your core demographic - and if they like the movie, that could start to draw in other genre fans.

That said, the movie isn't going to perform well because the company which owns the IP just did something which alienated their entire fan-base months prior to the release.