Hasbro & Universal To Make Sweet Board Game Movies Together

What's the dullest thing you can think of? Playing board games? You're wrong - the correct answer was watching a movie based on a board game.

But that's what's going to happen. Universal has signed up with toy firm Hasbro to make a bunch of films based on Hasbro products, possibly starting with - seriously - a Monopoly movie by Sir Ridley Scott. Nobody seems to have much of a clue what this Hasbro/Universal Monopoly movie will be about, but if it wants to remain faithful to the game it'll need to be 10 hours long and cause a longstanding bitter rift within every audience who watches it.

Oh, and it'll need to be as dull as shit, too. And you thought movies based on videogames were rubbish.

The list of terrible atrocities that Michael Bay is responsible for has just got longer. If it wasn't bad enough that Michael Bay took a Transformers movie and made it into a useless knockabout comedy containing two different piss jokes and a robot who speaks like a chav, he also had the temerity to make the bloody thing successful. And now we all have to live with the repercussions of that.

You see, Transformers are Hasbro toys, and now that Hasbro has seen the money that a successful movie makes, it wants to roll out movies based on just about every single Hasbro product. There's already a G.I Joe movie in the pipeline, and yesterday Hasbro announced a six-year deal with Universal to make at least four movies based on its catalogue. And one of the first movies to be made is, we wish this was a joke, Sir Ridley Scott's Monopoly. Variety reports:

The deal was announced by U chairman Marc Shmuger, co-chairman David Linde and Hasbro chief operating officer Brian Goldner. Like "G.I. Joe," several Hasbro branded properties have gone the development route as features over the years. The property with the most current momentum is "Monopoly," which Ridley Scott and Scott Free have been developing… "This deal gives Universal access to some of the greatest brands in the world," Shmuger and Linde said in a statement. "Hasbro's portfolio of products has tremendous emotional resonance with children and adults."

And you know what emotional resonance means, right? It means we'll go and see any old shit slid in front of us so long as even indirectly reminds of of our faded youth. Ace!

So if Hasbro's first movie with Universal is Monopoly, then what are the other three? Looking likely is a Stretch Armstrong movie, which actually we'd be quite happy to see so long as a) it starred Matthew McConaughey and b) he actually dislocated his shoulder for real very time he was called upon to stretch.

Other than that, who knows? Hasbro is a big brand. There might be a Boggle movie, a Guess Who movie, Risk movie, a Pictionary movie, a Tonka truck movie or - if we get the petition going now, a movie based around that Hasbro electric toothbrush that plays U Can't Touch This when you brush your teeth.

The possibilities are endless. And almost exclusively dreadful.

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Universal pacts with Hasbro - Variety