As you’ve been reading on TG, there are currently a number of board game movies under development in Hollywood.
Battleship is coming next year, Ouija was going to be made with McG directing and Michael Bay producing at Universal, but the studio just shut it down, having to pay $5 million in penalties for it.
Now one film I thought could actually be interesting would be Monopoly, especially with Blade Runner/Alien master Ridley Scott at the helm.
And yes, my excitement for this project has gone up because as Hollywood Reporter informs us, two of my favorite writers, Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander, are now on board to adapt it.
If the names aren’t immediately familiar, well, don’t worry, because a lot of people who don’t closely follow Hollywood may not know who wrote their favorite films.
Interestingly enough, Larry and Scott first broke in as the writers of Problem Child, which turned into something much worst than they initially intended, leading to them eventually writing the biopic of Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton.
“When we wrote the Problem Child movies, we didn’t set out to write crap,” Alexander says. “We set out to write a clever black comedy about parenting, and a couple of years later, it turned into this piece of garbage that people really liked. Nobody sets out to make bad movies; everyone wants to make a great movie. Once you get a hundred people together, and after years of work, it’s easy for people to lose the ball and forget (why they’re making it). They’re just trying to survive the experience. It’s hard enough just to make a movie at all.”
This is why Ed Wood had a lot of heart, and showed how much the director struggled to bring the vision of Glen or Glenda, and Plan 9 From Outer Space to the screen.
After Ed Wood, Larry and Scott wrote The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon, the Andy Kaufman biopic, produced and shepherded the Bob Crane biopic Auto Focus, and then crossed over into the Stephen King adaptation 1408.
If King doesn’t like an adaption of his work, you can’t use his name in the advertising and publicity, but he definitely dug 1408, and it was the first time in quite some time he allowed his name to be used in a movie campaign.
This is just the unique screenwriting challenge Larry and Scott usually thrive on, and I also think they can make a great team with Ridley, so here’s to hoping they can bring give Monopoly a great new life on the big screen.
