From “Clue” to “Ouija” to “Battleship”, tonnes of board games have been made into feature films by Hollywood. Some managed to do well at the box office, while the rest failed to become a critical success.
Earlier in July, Hasbro family board game “Monopoly” is reportedly going to get its own feature film adaptation at Lionsgate. As if that isn’t enough to capture our attention, another “Monopoly” film is apparently in the works.
But this time around, it will centre on the origins of the popular board game.
According to Variety, a movie about the origins of Monopoly is currently in the works at Big Beach Films, the same production company that gave us “Little Miss Sunshine”.
Marc Turtletaub and Peter Saraf of Big Beach are producing the film with Diane Nabatoff. Howard A. Rodman will be penning the script based on Mary Pilon‘s nonfiction book “The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World’s Favorite Board Game”.
Published in February by Bloomsbury, the book traces back to the year 1904 when the game was originally called “The Landlord’s Game” and created by anti-monopolist Elizabeth J. Magie Phillips. At the time, the game was used as an educational tool to demonstrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies. Charles Darrow encountered the game and sold the game to Parker Brothers as his own creation.
The movie will also be based on Ralph Anspach‘s memoir “The Billion Dollar Monopoly Swindle”, which tells the invention of his game, “Anti-Monopoly”.
Anscpach created the game with the intention to “battle the harmful pro-monopolist lessons taught by the mainstream game”. For over a decade, the economics professor battled the Parker Bros in court and uncovered the truth about Magie and Monopoly over the course of research for his case.
No director, stars, or studio are attached to the project yet, but it sounds like this project would end up looking like “The Social Network” or the upcoming “Ferrari” biopic.
What do you think? Would you watch a movie about the origins of “Monopoly”? Let us know in the comments box below.
Sources: The Guardian, /FILM, Variety.
