Fox Developing Magic: The Gathering Movie, Because That Went So Well For Dungeons & Dragons?
If they really wanted to pull something ballsy, it would just be 90 minutes of people playing cards.
We’re sorry, Magic: The Gathering fans (alternately, congratulations! But we’re guessing “sorry” is more apt). Your beloved tabletop card game is being made into a feature-length film by Fox. We fear no good can come from this.
According to Variety, 20th Century Fox has obtained the rights to the game, and Simon Kinberg has been tapped to produce the film and get it franchise-ready. He wrote X-Men: The Last Stand, which was pretty good. However, he also produced Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which was… well, it sure was a feature length movie. Wizards of the Coast CEO Greg Leeds will oversee and executive produce the endeavor, along with several CEOs from Hasbro.
Unfortunately none of us here are experts on the game itself (save for our lead developer Justin Ouellette, who we bet will have something more in-depth to say about this later), but we’re all inherently pretty suspicious of taking something like a tabletop game and trying to turn it into a film franchise. I mean, forget about the horrible 2000 Dungeons & Dragons film for a second — remember how bad Battleship was? There is simply not a very good enough track record of games-turned-movies to be 100% optimistic about Magic: The Gathering‘s chances.
Of course, there is a small sliver of hope: Magic: The Gathering does have an overarching plot. In fact, every new expansion pack of cards has an intricate storyline underneath that informs the relationships between all of those cards. If they were committed to doing the film version right, all they’d need to do is pick a plane from their multiverse of stories– most likely Dominaria, since that appears to be the largest and most established universe — and run with it. So you never know, maybe it’ll be less like Battleship movie and more like Clue.
(via Variety and The Mary Sue, image via Isma Monfort Vialcanet)
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