Through most of my life, I learned to expect movie producers and their creative teams to show contempt for the science-fiction, fantasy, or comic book stories I loved.

Once, not too long ago, movie producers would license a genre character or work of fantastic fiction, say Asimov’s robot stories, Dungeons & Dragons, or any video game, just looking for a familiar name to put butts in seats on opening weekend and to give marketing a head start.

If it was sci-fi, fantasy, or a game, then the producer and almost certainly the creative team didn’t know or care about the story and characters behind the brand. So, in the 80s, when Cannon Films licensed Spider-Man, the producers planned a film by then-hot horror director Tobe Hooper where Peter Parker turns into hairy, 8-limbed spider hybrid more like Cronenberg’s fly then Lee and Ditko’s character.

Then, the writers and directors hired for genre projects usually showed contempt for the original creations. They came from an era when popular fiction featured detectives and cowboys, where science fiction and fantasy meant drive-in creature features and bedtime tales, and where comics were for tots. So, when they adapted for the screen, they kept the title and the bits my parents knew—that D&D included dragons, that Superman liked Lois Lane, and that Spider-Man climbed walls. Sometimes, we still hear big shot writers and directors boast that they avoided the books or comics in favor of a new direction. Such creators see a property’s original writers and artists with a certain arrogance, as hacks who lacked the capacity for serious creative works. Surely a serious filmmaker can do better than whatsisname.

To win at the box office, a movie needed to reach far past the comparatively tiny audience of fans for a character like Spider-Man. You would lose your house just selling to 10-year-old Superman readers; you had to reach golfers, bikers, bridge groups, and so on. To free grownups from the embarrassment of buying tickets to something as infantile as a comic book character, the Superman (1978) producers gave a fortune to Important Actor Marlon Brando. For 15 minutes of screen time, Brando received $3.7 million up front, plus 11.75% of the film’s take, right off the top. In that environment, producers made no attempt to please fans by staying true to a source. They never even bothered to learn what made the property resonate. Besides, nerds will see the movie anyway.

Since that Superman movie reached theaters, Hollywood’s approach to sci-fi, fantasy, games, and comics changed completely, and the D&D movie shows just how much.

Now, someone can make a big-budget movie about a game that those golfer and bridge players once considered a cultish pastime for misfits who can’t handle reality. (Adults make-believe as wizards! Can you imagine?) Rather than keeping the brand and dumping the rest in favor of a fresh direction, the filmmakers invested enormous creative energy in mining D&D lore for its wealth of evocative ideas, and then put them on the screen. The filmmakers went on to create vivid characters, give them growth arcs, and then cast stars in the roles. The story even matches the unpredictable turns of a D&D game. “What we really tried to capture was the spirit of gameplay, where nothing goes the way you expect it to,” co-writer John Frances Daley says. “So we would set something up in our story that the DM would have very painstakingly created for the players, and with one wrong roll of the die, it all goes to crap, and they have to figure out a way out of it. It’s unconventional.” And for the biggest twist, the filmmakers created humor from the characters and the situations rather than metaphorically winking at the camera and making fun of the property, as if to say we made this movie for a buck, but we’re too important to take this seriously. The 60s Batman series shows how that goes.

Things have changed, but when we learned of a new D&D movie, we still braced for a disappointing goof on D&D that mocked the game and its fans. The movie steers clear of that sort of insult.

Still, seeking to make a good D&D movie that will please both fans and a wider audience is far, far easier than sticking the landing. I’m old enough to remember how filmmakers reacted to Star Wars by trying to copy its elements. All the knock offs disappointed—despite the presence of both robots and spaceships. Making good movies always proves hard.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves sticks the landing.