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\u2019s 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 \u201cHey, some bright young Hollywood mind will tie themselves into knots coming up with a decent story for a Monopoly\u00a0movie one of these days, right?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not, as it turns out, so much, even as\u00a0Deadline\u00a0reports<\/a> that Lionsgate is once again taking a stab at getting a movie version of the \u201cfranchise\u201d off the ground, now resorting to tapping two different writing teams (A Minecraft Movie<\/a>\u2018s Neil Widener and Gavin James, and Dumb Money<\/a>\u2018s 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<\/a>\u2014which then tanked after 2012\u2019s Battleship<\/a>\u00a0failed to set the world on fire with its terrifying \u201cpegs going into plastic ships\u201d action.\u00a0<\/p>\n After independent producer Randall Emmett took a roll of the dice in the mid-2010s (describing his script as being not unlike\u00a0The Goonies<\/a>, while also spinning dreams of a\u00a0Hungry 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<\/a> that was apparently going to be written by Gattaca\u2018s Andrew Niccol, plus a separate take<\/a> that would have seen Kevin Hart star, and then, most recently, a version penned by\u00a0Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves\u00a0team John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein. All of which, in case it wasn\u2019t 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\u2014now dragging Margot Robbie and her Lucky Chap production company along for the trip<\/a>, presumably because nobody knows the art of turning toy room plastic<\/a> into giant stacks of real-world cash like Robbie.<\/p>\n Fact is, Hasbro has been\u00a0very\u00a0aggressive, over the last 20 years, about trying to replicate the success it had with the\u00a0Transformers\u00a0movies with its other brands\u2014in defiance of the fact that that franchise came pre-equipped with little things like cool robots, characters, and a basic plot, while a Monopoly\u00a0script 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\u2014which is to say, it\u2019s had two extremely short-lived game show versions that both failed to last more than two years on the air\u2014with Netflix currently working<\/a> on a new unscripted series with Studio Lambert, the folks behind\u00a0The Traitors. Meanwhile, Hasbro continues to remind everybody that\u00a0Monopoly\u00a0is \u201cthe world\u2019s most popular board game brand,\u201d which it seems to think is an indicator of quality, and not just the fact that not enough people have heard of, like, Wingspan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not unlike a bored family trapped in close indoor proximity to each other by rain\/depression\/bees\/what have you, Hollywood…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702565,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-702564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=702564"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702564\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702565"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}