MONOPOLY in Wonderland!
We now know how Ridley Scott plans to make the board game Monopoly into a movie, and brace yourself, it's probably the dumbest thing you'll hear all year.
All that talk of a Wall Street-esque tale of greed and real estate, all that talk from Sir. Ridley Scott that he was aiming to make a movie which carried the "futuristic sheen" of Blade Runner, well it just looks dumb now, doesn't it? Universal had to tell us eventually just how in God's name they planned to make the popular but tiresome Monopoly board game into a movie and now the pieces are out of the box, well... it's the dumbest fucking movie idea I think I've ever heard, quite frankly. Basically, the "metaphor for life" idea boils 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. I promise you, I'm not making this up. If you read the following quotes under this image and find yourself gasping and shaking your head in disbelief at the absurdity that a major Hollywood studio at Universal would pay millions of dollars for this, then don't worry. Move away from your computer and relax. It only means you are still sane.
"I took the approach of thinking of the main character falling down a rabbit hole and into a real place called Monopoly City," he begins. "It was the re-engineering of 'Alice in Wonderland' that got me thinking and then with this it came around full circle and I was able to utilize that."...says producer Frank Beddor, whose initial concept attracted the attention of Ridley, who nearly took off his hand with a childlike glee of excitement when he pitched it to him. Presumably, ideas like this one is the reason why Beddor hasn't produced a movie since There's Something About Mary over a decade ago. Here we go, we are just getting started folks. You rolled a double six. Anther turn... You haven't heard a worse idea for a movie as this one in quite some time...
"I created a comedic, lovable loser who lives in Manhattan and works at a real estate company and hes not very good at his job but hes great at playing Monopoly. And the world record for playing is 70 straight days over 1,600 hours and he wanted to try to convince his friends to help him break that world record. They think he is crazy. They kid him about this girl and they're playing the game and theres this big fight. And hes holding a Chance card and after theyve left he says, Damn, I wanted to use that Chance card, and he throws it down. He falls asleep and then he wakes up in the morning and hes holding the Chance card, and he thinks, Thats odd."Oh yes, they really do go there!. Let's see how deep this stupid idea goes...
"Hes all groggy and he goes down to buy some coffee and he reaches into his pocket and all he has is Monopoly money. All this Monopoly money pours out. Hes confused and embarrassed and the girl reaches across the counter and says, Thats OK. And she gives him change in Monopoly money. He walks outside and hes in this very vibrant place, Monopoly City, and hes just come out of a Chance Shop. As it goes on, he takes on the evil Parker Brothers in the game of Monopoly. He has to defeat them. It tries to incorporate all the iconic imageries -- a sports car pulls up, there's someone on a horse, someone pushing a wheelbarrow -- and rich Uncle Pennybags, you're going to see him as the maître d' at the restaurant and he's the buggy driver and the local eccentric and the doorman at the opera. There's all these sight gags."Oh God.. it's Jumanji isn't it? Beddor, who almost still can't believe he attached Ridley Scott to this project, kind of hints that Scott took on the idea because he remembers fondly playing the game as a child with the whole family. So for him, I guess, it's a nostalgia thing. It had to be something like that because this is strictly not his territory. We've only really seen him venture into a broad family comedy once and that was over twenty years ago (Legend), this is a project that a Shawn Levy or an Andy Fickman would usually helm.
"Look, so much of it is about the execution. You know the visual component is going to be beautiful with Ridley. And you have all of the world editions to deal with -- there are different editions of the game so the city won't be limited to the Atlantic City edition that we know in America. Ridley grew up with the British version ... ."Since Beddor's concept a few years ago, screenwriter Pamela Pettner (Monster House, 9) has come on to scribe and it'll be her work they will be going with and hopefully she's had the wise sense to change a lot of this ridiculous plot. Shame on all those involved with this movie. And double shame that during the period of nominations for the Hollywood"Black List", (an annual list of the best screenplays in the industry that have so far gone unproduced because studio fat cats are willing to plough money into this crap) a dumb idea like this gets made into a big budget studio film at Universal. Shame, shame, shame.