Monopoly The Movie?
Film director Sir Ridley Scott is planning to make a feature-length version of the classic board game Monopoly.
The 69-year-old British film-maker, whose hits include Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, has been offered the pick of young actresses to help turn the property game into a racy comedy thriller.
William Morris, the oldest theatrical agency in Hollywood, has promised Hasbro, the manufacturer of Monopoly, that its stable of 2,000 actors will help create a blockbuster movie.
Scarlett Johansson, 22, star of Lost in Translation, once joked that she explored London through the British version of Monopoly. She is said to find the prospect of a film version “funny, wacky, but interesting”.
Other stars being considered for roles include Kirsten Dunst, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend. Scott is expected to cast a mature actor as Rich Uncle Pennybags, the rampant capitalist in a top hat who appears on Monopoly boxes .
Hasbro, which claims that Monopoly has been played by 750m people since the 1930s, wants the film to feature “sexy young people” in an attempt to make board games more attractive to the younger generation.
Ironically, Hollywood might find more fertile territory for movies based on board games in the form of contemporary classics such as Settlers of Catan and HeroScape but such games are unlikely to be deemed to have sufficiently universal brand recognition.
“Hasbro already has cool games like Ouija, which could be a supernatural movie, but we think of Monopoly with Ridley Scott as director or producer, as a massive global hit. Everyone has played Monopoly in one version or another so, hopefully, they would be curious about how it translates to the screen,” said a Hasbro consultant last week.
