Honor Among Thieves Lands on Pluto TV

A 2023 box-office disappointment, now a cult favorite, finally becomes free to watch on June 1, 2026. A short defense of a film that always knew what it was.

The film the box office said no to, three years on

On June 1, 2026, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves arrives free on Pluto TV. Eight days from now. No subscription, no rental fee, no app friction beyond an account. The kind of distribution outcome that in another timeline would have been a quiet footnote in the slow lifecycle of a studio film. In this timeline it is the closing chapter of a story the film has been writing in the background since March 2023.

The story is not a tragedy. It is closer to a vindication.

When the film opened, the verdict came in fast. Roughly $208 million global on a $150 million production budget, with marketing reportedly north of $80 million. Deep red ink for a tentpole. No sequel was greenlit. Paramount moved on. The fan community kept the film alive on streaming and word of mouth, the Rotten Tomatoes scores held steady at 91 percent critics and 93 percent audience, and three years on the consensus has fully reversed. Giant Freakin’ Robot called it the best fantasy movie of the decade destroyed by corporate greed. Collider called it destined to be a cult classic. The people who actually watch it keep recommending it.

It is, quietly, one of the best-loved studio films of 2023.

What the film actually is

The defense is short because the film does not need much help making its own case. Directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, the pair who wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming and directed Game Night, Honor Among Thieves is an ensemble comedy in fantasy drag with the ratio precisely calibrated. The comedy is dry and the actors trust it. The fantasy is rendered with affection and a working knowledge of the source material. The plot moves. The set pieces are clean. The film is around 134 minutes and it earns the runtime.

Chris Pine plays Edgin, the bard, with the relaxed competence of an actor who has finally been cast in something he can lean back into. Michelle Rodriguez, as the barbarian Holga, plays the role straight and the film is better for it. Justice Smith and Sophia Lillis hold their corners of the ensemble cleanly. Hugh Grant, as the villain, is doing what Hugh Grant has been doing for the last decade, which is showing up in a supporting role with more craft than the part required and walking off with a third of the runtime. The standout performance, the one most reviewers undersold at launch, is Regé-Jean Page as the paladin Xenk. Page plays a humourless lawful-good knight with such total conviction that the film extracts its biggest laughs from his earnestness without ever winking at the audience. That is hard to do. He does it.

The film knows what it is. That is the most undervalued thing a studio film can do, and the thing the last decade of tentpoles has done least well. Honor Among Thieves does not wink at being a D&D adaptation. It does not lampshade the gameplay mechanics for an audience that does not play. It does not stop mid-set-piece to deliver a sincere monologue about found family. It is a fantasy comedy. It executes the genre. It respects the genre. It expects the audience to enjoy the genre at full strength without an apology for the genre being there. That posture is the film’s most generous gift to the viewer, and the gift the long-tail audience has been responding to.

Why it did not land at launch

The film opened on March 31, 2023, into a market that did not know what to do with it. Fantasy as a theatrical category had been struggling for over a decade by then. The non-Marvel four-quadrant tentpole was on the way to becoming an endangered species. The D&D brand carried name recognition without bringing the kind of active fan urgency that drives an opening weekend the way comic-book intellectual property does. The marketing did not solve any of these problems. The trailers played the comedy without selling the fantasy. The posters looked like four other films from the same season. The opening-weekend gross came in well below the studio’s expectations, the studio absorbed the verdict over the next two weekends, and the sequel conversation died inside a month.

The simplest reading is that the film was the right film at the wrong window. A four-quadrant tentpole audience does not arrive opening weekend for an ensemble fantasy comedy with no pre-existing cinematic universe. That audience arrives over months, after friends have pushed the film into their queues, after the streaming window opens, after the trial has cost the viewer nothing more than two hours of an evening they were going to spend at home anyway. The launch window measured an audience that was never going to show up. The actual audience was always going to show up later, on Paramount+, on the Pluto TV free debut, on the Netflix rotation that picked the film up in late 2024, and on the kind of word-of-mouth recommendation that does its work quietly over years rather than weeks.

The streaming-era rehabilitation

The reappraisal has been complete for at least a year. Honor Among Thieves is now routinely cited in the kind of best-of-the-2020s lists that get drafted by writers who actually watch films rather than chase opening-weekend grosses. The TikTok and YouTube fan-edit ecosystem keeps the cast clips in circulation. The D&D community, which initially hesitated to over-celebrate the film for fear of jinxing a sequel, has fully embraced it as the definitive cinematic adaptation of the property. Most studio films from 2023 have been entirely forgotten by 2026. Honor Among Thieves has only become more loved.

The Pluto TV debut on June 1 closes the rehabilitation loop. Free, ad-supported, no subscription required, no friction. The film moves from being a film that did not earn its sequel into a film that anyone with a screen can watch on a Tuesday evening for the cost of a few commercial breaks. That is, finally, the distribution outcome the film was always going to have. It just took three years to get there.

A brief note from the operator desk

There is a small observation here for the reader who comes to Frame 47 for the operator lens. Call the move the launch-window trap. A piece of work that lands well with the audience it can reach is not the same piece of work as a piece of work that lands inside the institution’s preferred measurement window. The two get conflated, especially by the institutions doing the measuring. The cost of the conflation is borne by the people who made the work and by the audience who would have arrived later if the institution had been patient enough to let them.

One operator’s version, from outside the film industry. A conservative underwriting model, built deliberately to price a risk the rest of the desk was choosing not to price. The model bled margin in year one. The launch-quarter verdict on it was too cautious. The desk head moved on. The model stayed in production because nobody bothered to kill it. By year three it was the only model on the floor that had not blown up, and the three-year verdict was load-bearing. Nobody who rendered the original verdict was around to render the second. The instrument that had measured the model in quarter one was the wrong instrument for the work the model was doing. The same gap, on a smaller stage, with longer-tail consequences. Honor Among Thieves knew what kind of film it was. The studio’s instrument did not. Three years on, the film is the one that gets to be right.

That is the only operator observation the essay will offer. The film deserves the rest of the page for itself.

What to do with this

If you have not seen Honor Among Thieves, June 1 is a clean place to start. Pluto TV. Free. A Tuesday evening, two hours, a fantasy comedy executed at the top of its category by people who knew exactly what they were doing. If you have seen it, you have probably been telling friends to see it. The Pluto TV debut is a good moment to do it again, with the small additional context that the film’s slow vindication is now functionally complete.

The frame

The box office is the first reading. It is rarely the final one. Honor Among Thieves is the film about a band of thieves who turn out to be more honest than the institution they are working for. There is a small joke in the fact that the film’s own studio could not see what the film was while it was in front of them, and that the film has spent three years being defended by an audience the studio did not know was waiting. The film found its people. The institution did not get the sequel. The film does not seem to mind. Neither should the people who love it.

June 1. Pluto TV. Free. Watch it again, or for the first time.