If you haven’t already heard the news, I’ll sum it up for you: Ridley Scott is directing a feature film version of Monopoly. It’s probably the single strangest thing I’ve ever heard in the film business. I’m not sure if Scott himself seems to know what this movie will be about, because he keeps waffling on the subject: one moment he says it’ll be a broad family comedy, and the next minute it’s going to be dark like Blade Runner. He seems to have only been wooed by the fact that it’s one of the best-selling board games in the world.
This doesn’t mean that making a movie out of a board game is a bad idea, necessarily. It worked for Clue, after all. But unless Scott’s movie features Rich Uncle Pennybags jumping around with his monocle screwed firmly in place, I’m going to have to call shenanigans on it. Check out our list below of the 10 Board Games We’d Like To See As Movies, complete with fantasy casting.
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There are few board games that have endured the test of time to still get played today even during the video game craze. Games like Monopoly, Scrabble, Risk, and Clue are still available at your neighborhood store, decades after they came out. In fact, they’ve all seen multiple releases over the years. There’s a billion different versions of Monopoly out there, and you can even Make-Your-Own-Opoly. Scrabble is still as popular as ever, especially given the Scrabulous flap over at Facebook, and Risk just came out with a revised edition that has new rules and pieces. That just leaves us with Clue.
Clue, or Cluedo as it is called in the United Kingdom, where it was invented by Anthony Pratt, was created out of a love for murder mysteries. It was first published in 1949 and still endures to this day in multiple versions. To name a few, there’s The Simpson’s Clue, a Clue DVD Game, and even Clue Express for people with limited time on their hands. Clue also came out with a new edition just a few weeks okay, completely updated with biographies for the characters, new weapons, and a second deck of cards. I’m not sure how I feel about Professor Plum being changed to Victor Plum, a dot com billionaire. That’s like replacing Gumdrop Pass in Candyland with “Bean Sprout Way” to encourage kids to eat healthy. Don’t mess with nostalgia, man.
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“I cannot help but want to know the fine print. Are the filmmakers [Susan Buice & Arin Crumley] who they say they are? Are they truly at risk financially? How did they hook up with Spout.com?” - John Bell
A little background on our Four Eyed Monsters, a buck for Susan & Arin promotion.
I met Susan and Arin at the Waterfront Film Festival in 2005. I knew right away they had something special going on and wanted to work with them again. When Arin approached me a couple weeks ago saying they were in the works with YouTube to put Four Eyed Monsters, the feature up for free, we asked ourselves a question, “Is their a way we can grow community around this movie and help fund these filmmakers?”
That’s when we came up with the buck for Susan & Arin idea. That’s the grand-master scheme behind it. Yes, Susan & Arin are truly in debt up to their eyeballs. I talked to Arin today and he admitted they have $148 in the bank and owe money to a lot of people who helped them along the way. Neither of them has worked on anything but this feature film in the past three years and they’ve yet to turn all the social currency they’ve built into monetary currency. But we want to help them do that.
