So even though Universal has pretty much dropped every Hasbro game they had in development except for “Battleship” — perhaps realizing that spending $200 million on a board game movie wasn’t the best idea — the game maker is still pushing ahead trying to show their movies can be successful and respectable. Believe it or not, Ridley Scott is still attached to direct “Monopoly,” and while we’ll go along and pretend that he’ll eventually direct this (yeah right, our guess is he’ll wind up “executive producing” with some protegé taking the director’s chair), Hasbro has made a pretty surprising move which should at least keep the helmer interested.
THR reports that screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski will attempt to mould some kind of narrative out of a thimble, a dog, a car, a guy on a horse, Community Chest, Baltic Avenue and Chance. The pair are best known for being the pens behind the biopics “Ed Wood,” “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” and “Man On The Moon” and we presume they will delve into the meaty history of Rich Uncle Pennybags. Of course, there is no actual word yet on what the plot will entail but let’s hope it’s not in the ballpark of what was discussed a couple of years ago.
Back in 2009, “Monopoly” producer Frank Beddor revealed his kind of acid-trip idea for the movie. “I created a comedic, lovable loser who lives in Manhattan and works at a real estate company and he’s not very good at his job but he’s great at playing Monopoly. And the world record for playing is 70 straight days – over 1,600 hours – and he wanted to try to convince his friends to help him break that world record. They think he is crazy. They kid him about this girl and they’re playing the game and there’s this big fight. And he’s holding a Chance card and after they’ve left he says, ‘Damn, I wanted to use that Chance card,’ and he throws it down. He falls asleep and then he wakes up in the morning and he’s holding the Chance card, and he thinks, ‘That’s odd.’”
Um, yeah. So we just hope that Alexander and Karaszewski aren’t drinking whatever fruit punch Beddor is dishing out. But more recently, Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner also spilled a bit on a more coherent vision. “It’s a very human and personal story. It’s not really ‘Wall Street,’ not at all,” he elaborated. “It’s a fictionalized story of a family, and there’s a lot of intrigue in the story. Suffice it to say, it’s a story about a family with a history, and we’re projecting that into current times. But it’s not ‘Wall Street.’ It’s more about property ownership and of the play-pattern of the game.”
But like we said, with Scott currently busy on “Prometheus” and now lining up another “Blade Runner” movie we highly doubt he’ll deviate from expanding the original worlds he created on the big screen to tackle…a Hasbro movie. Unless that script is some kind of “There Will Be Blood” next level shit or something, but we’re not gonna hold our breath on that.
