Not unlike a bored family trapped in close indoor proximity to each other by rain/depression/bees/what have you, Hollywood has been deluding itself for years at this point that there’s some fun to be found in Monopoly. 18 years, in fact, dating back to 2008, when desperate executives at Hasbro first looked at each other, shrugged, and said “Hey, some bright young Hollywood mind will tie themselves into knots coming up with a decent story for a Monopoly movie one of these days, right?”
Not, as it turns out, so much, even as Deadline reports that Lionsgate is once again taking a stab at getting a movie version of the “franchise” off the ground, now resorting to tapping two different writing teams (A Minecraft Movie‘s Neil Widener and Gavin James, and Dumb Money‘s Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum) at the same time to try to make this damn thing work. Which would, by our count, be something like the sixth (and seventh) attempts at a cinematic Monopoly, dating all the way back to the days when Ridley Scott, of all people, was attached to a version set up at Universal—which then tanked after 2012’s Battleship failed to set the world on fire with its terrifying “pegs going into plastic ships” action.
After independent producer Randall Emmett took a roll of the dice in the mid-2010s (describing his script as being not unlike The Goonies, while also spinning dreams of a Hungry Hungry Hippos film franchise), the rights landed at Lionsgate, which has now spent more than a decade trying to get this cursed thimble to hop. That includes a version that was apparently going to be written by Gattaca‘s Andrew Niccol, plus a separate take that would have seen Kevin Hart star, and then, most recently, a version penned by Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. All of which, in case it wasn’t clear, have since been sent straight to cinematic jail. And yet, like play-acting capitalists who believe a big payday is only a quick ride on the Short Line away, Lionsgate keeps trying—now dragging Margot Robbie and her Lucky Chap production company along for the trip, presumably because nobody knows the art of turning toy room plastic into giant stacks of real-world cash like Robbie.
Fact is, Hasbro has been very aggressive, over the last 20 years, about trying to replicate the success it had with the Transformers movies with its other brands—in defiance of the fact that that franchise came pre-equipped with little things like cool robots, characters, and a basic plot, while a Monopoly script is presumably going to have to spend at least a few pages fleshing out the motivations of a sentient shoe with big real estate dreams. The board game has had slightly more success in television—which is to say, it’s had two extremely short-lived game show versions that both failed to last more than two years on the air—with Netflix currently working on a new unscripted series with Studio Lambert, the folks behind The Traitors. Meanwhile, Hasbro continues to remind everybody that Monopoly is “the world’s most popular board game brand,” which it seems to think is an indicator of quality, and not just the fact that not enough people have heard of, like, Wingspan.
