About a year ago, Hasbro sold the movie rights to several of its board games to Universal Pictures, ignoring the fact that making a movie out of a board game is a stupid idea. In times like these, Hollywood will take any ideas it can get, even stupid ones. Besides, it wasn't so long ago that everyone thought it was foolhardy to make a film based on a Disneyland ride.

Which brings us to the point: Gore Verbinski, who directed the three Pirates of the Caribbean films, has signed on to make a movie based on the board game Clue. You may recall that there was already a movie version of Clue (in 1985) which means this isn't even an original bad idea.

The only way to make a good movie based on a board game would be to do what Verbinski did with the Pirates trilogy: ignore the source material altogether. Take the basic scenario ("there are pirates in the Caribbean") and throw everything else away. And it sounds like that's the plan with Clue, as one of the producers is describing it as "a global thriller and transmedia event that uses deductive reasoning as its storytelling engine." That doesn't sound like Professor Plum using the candlestick as a weapon in the library -- and that's good. We already did that; it was fine, it had three different endings, that was nifty, the end.

Of course, this raises another question. If all you're going to use from the game is the basic premise ("using deductive reasoning to solve a murder"), then why call it Clue at all? You see why the whole thing is kind of a lame idea. They're going to wind up using a familiar title that doesn't actually have much to do with the game it comes from.

Hardcore Clue purists might be troubled anyway, since Hasbro announced last year that it was revising the board game. The characters have first names now, there are more rooms in the mansion (including a theater and a guesthouse), and a trophy, an ax, and a baseball bat have been added as weapons. For all I know this violates the sacred trust between Clue fans and Hasbro, and Hasbro has forsaken the property altogether now. I don't know how things work in the devoted board game fan community.

But if a film adaptation must be done, I don't doubt that Gore Verbinski can pull it off. The man is versatile. In addition to the Pirates films, he's made a couple of under-appreciated oddball comedies (The Mexican and The Weather Man, plus The Ring, which remains one of the very few worthwhile Japanese-horror-film remakes). Heck, his first feature was Mouse Hunt, which I have not seen but which appears to be centered on two bumbling guys chasing a mouse. Surely a man who can make a whole movie based on nothing more than a Tom and Jerry premise can make something based on a board game.

* * * * *

Eric D. Snider (website) looks forward to the movie version of Uno.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us