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.

A number of scenes were changed between the early prototype and the final release. For example, in the mausoleum section there were originally no skulls jumping out at Dirk, and no skeletal hand trying to grab him. He simply walked down the corridor, but could be directed to exit through any of the doors to the left or right, with some containing Crypt Creeps. He could also exit through the door at the end of the corridor, which is inaccessible in the final version.

During the game's early prototypes, Dirk used to be able to exit through many different ways in certain rooms. For example, on the Castle Vestibule scene, Dirk could either exit through a trap door, the left door, or the right door.

In the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair, the copy protection coder of the game left a message to crackers. The message says:


This message apparently worked, as the Amiga version of Dragon's Lair: Escape from Singe's Castle contained an additional message from the game's copy protector Randy Linden once again asking crackers to wait to crack the game and thanking them for listening with the first game. This message reads:

According to director Don Bluth, Princess Daphne's design was heavily inspired by animator Gary Goldman's Playboy magazine collection. Bluth used the magazines for reference, as well as partial inspiration from Marilyn Monroe: