A feature film adaptation of Dragon's Lair has been planned for years, but has thus far never made it off of the drawing board. After the success of the Dragon's Lair video game in arcades, director Don Bluth wanted to make an animated feature based off of the game, but this was scrapped in 1984.

The same year, a Dragon's Lair animated TV series was made by Ruby-Spears Productions, but Bluth had no part in making the show other than giving model sheets of the characters to the production team. Changes to the designs were made, and this resulted in Bluth later disliking the series.

According to Bluth's biography from John Cawley's website, he later developed a story for a Dragon's Lair movie entitled "Dragon's Lair: The Legend". It focused on a teenage Dirk, as well as his origins with Princess Daphne. Dragon's Lair: The Legend followed many different concepts from the game, such as consideration for making Dirk talk, which would later lead to the character being mute due to a spell that was cast upon him. Bluth considered Michael J. Fox to voice Dirk for the feature. He later pitched Dragon's Lair: The Legend to a studio, but they did not go forward with it, thus development for the film was scrapped once again.

In 2015, Bluth announced that the Dragon's Lair animated film would be revived as a crowdfunded project on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, resulting in the creation of a 5-minute animated pitch trailer that was shopped around to production companies. This version removed the "blonde airhead" personality of Daphne and toned down her sexualized appearance. It acted as a prequel to the game showing the origins of Dirk and Daphne's relationship and the creation of Singe the Dragon and his lair by Mordroc from Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp.

While this version of the film once again did not get off the ground, it did lead to a live-action adaptation being approved for Netflix in 2020. The film was planned to have Ryan Reynolds as a producer and star as Dirk, and would have followed a similar path as the game in being an interactive movie, a format that Netflix was exploring at the time. This concept was later reworked to be a normal movie, and was confirmed to still be in production as of July 2024.