Daring the curse of all movies about fantasy-based games to strike them with lightning, 20th Century Fox has announced that they are founding a movie franchise “on the scale of Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings” on Magic: The Gathering, that game you wanted to learn because every middle school boy who would sometimes talk to you was playing it but didn’t because people already made fun of you for talking to them about Animorphs all the time.
Okay, maybe that was just me.
It’s true. As true as The Hollywood Reporter.
The studio has enlisted Simon Kinberg, the Fox-based writer-producer who is also helping shepherd the X-Men and Fantastic Four universes at the studio, to produce the adaptation. Kinberg will also act as the franchise’s engineer — or supreme sorcerer, if you will — overseeing the development of the movie series in concert with Hasbro execs.
As you might have guessed from the opening of this article, I’m no expert in the overall setting or continuity of Magic: The Gathering. In fact I’m probably most familiar with their infamous gag cards in the Unglued expansion, not exactly a good foundation for understanding. But I’ve never gotten a sense that storyline or character was particularly important to the fans of the game, which kind of begs the question: why not just make your own crazy horror/steampunk/high fantasy/cosmic/dimension hopping fantasy continuity instead of paying for an IP? Perhaps because The Chronicles of Riddick is already a thing?
For every Lord of the Rings, there’s a Dungeons & Dragons, for every Jumanji, there’s a Battleship. Of course, Magic: The Gathering: The Movie could be a Candyland. In that it is proposed and deals are struck but no movie actually results.
(Any attempts to dispute the value of Jumanji will be treated with Dowager Countess-level disdain.)
(via The Hollywood Reporter.)
