At this point of his career does anyone really believe that
Sir. Ridley Scott will ever find the time to make a movie based on the laborious board game
Monopoly? No, of course not. He has far more interesting attachments to his name, a healthy pile of which seems to grow higher with each passing year and the projects he leaves behind very rarely become anything. Truth is, if he was going to make a Monopoly movie he would have done it years ago when his bizarre interest in the property was first cited. The long-gestating film development of the most boring board game of all time is lasting about as long as a family game lasts... i.e. forever. But Hasbro CEO
Brian Goldner, sounding a little like a poor lassie awaiting a man she met on a night out who told her "I'll call you" to get in touch, has told
MTV that he's still hopeful the film will happen...
Monopoly is still happening, and were developing a great story... Its a very fun take. Ridley is still the perfect creative steward, because he creates these great, fictionalized worlds. Its going to be a very fun story to tell.
Goldner also talked a little about the story that is being put together and whether it would be anything like the stock-brokering 80's drama Wall Street, which was an early rumour for how the movie could develop;
Its a very human and personal story. Its not really Wall Street, not at all... Its a fictionalized story of a family, and theres a lot of intrigue in the story. Suffice it to say, its a story about a family with a history, and were projecting that into current times. But its not Wall Street. Its more about property ownership and of the play-pattern of the game.
'Play-pattern of the game'? They mean roll the dice... pay rent... another person rolls dice... receives rent... and then a few times you end up in jail and nobody ever seems to get anywhere or win? Sounds like a depressing movie to us. The idea still sounds curiously vague to us though as if they still haven't quite worked out how they plan to tackle it. A couple of years ago, they gave us a rather odd explanation; Basically, the
metaphor for life idea for the Monopoly boardgame was to boil down to ripping-off Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland,
where our lead wakes up after taking a chance card playing Monopoly and finds himself in another reality not unlike the board game, spending Monopoly movie and buying properties, fighting off
The Parker Brothers and sharing some chuckles with Uncle Pennybags, who is a
maître d at a restaurant. You can heard my response to what I called "the dumbest film idea I've ever heard in my life" -
HERE.
Because of Hasbro's deal with Universal (which includes the forthcoming Battleship movie) - Monopoly is set-up there and if it does actually end up being made (we don't think it will, at least not with Scott directing) and they give it a sizable budget when they shunned Del Toro's At The Mountains of Madness... well... it's not worth thinking about.