Passing Go
At The Wall Street Journal, Lauren A. E. Schuker notices a trend in the movie business:
Soon to be starring in his own feature-length film with Universal Pictures: Stretch Armstrong, the pliant, muscle-bound doll whose roots go back to the 1970s. Big Wheel, the plastic tricycle, has its own TV show in the works. Even the board game Risk has a deal for a film, to be co-produced by star Will Smith.
These brands are appealing because they are considered to be – a-hem – “toyetic,” a term that Hollywood uses to describe the propensity of a film concept to invigorate a line of toy merchandise, as in the $384 million jump in sales that Hasbro enjoyed after the launching of the Transformers film franchise.
In the wake of Transformers and G.I. Joe, talent agents are being hired to represent brands such as Micronauts and Barbie in new film negotiations. But what’s really interesting is the appearance of board games in this market. Along with the Risk film, Battleship and Monopoly are also being contemplated. I hear that a Ouija board film is already slated, and Schuker learns that that Etch-a-Sketch is being wooed.
No doubt we’ll soon hear that Samuel L. Jackson is appearing in Snakes on a Ladder.
Skeptical about board game blockbusters? Star Trek director J.J. Abrams is confident that he can make lemonade out of the most unlikely of lemons,
Sometimes, when someone is not a celebrity and you are casting them in a role, everyone who is in a seat of authority voices questions about that actor’s talent, sex appeal, looks, ability — their everything [...] But then they get the role, and suddenly they are on the cover of every magazine, and nobody questions those things again. In retrospect, everyone says, ‘Of course that person is a star.’
But board games aren’t actors. I don’t anticipate seeing Risk acting risque on the cover of US Weekly, or Charlize Theron walking a red carpet on the arm of the Community Chest.
In fact, these games aren’t even stories. At least Clue came with a set of events that could be made into a bawdy mystery; even a screenwriter assigned to Mr. Potato Head has a character to work with. But most of these game brands come with little inherent narrative content. How does one draw inspiration for a gripping Battleship storyline from the likelihood of a hit on D7? Maybe Hollywood can take lemons and make lemonade, but this is like doing it with lemon zest, which sounds infinitely more impressive.
What’s more, I observe that the games cited above have a common feature: not narrative, but strategy. That’s the real story, here. Despite Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft, strategy board games are still making a lot of money. These days, Monopoly has an iphone app, it held a championship tournament in Las Vegas, there’s a new tie-in with Google maps, and even a feature documentary about the history of the game.
Would it surprise you to learn that the game started in the Great Depression? Of course not. It was an ideal compensatory fantasy for the era, an illusion of property over displacement, of control over chaos.
And today, in hard times brought about by excessive monopoly and risk, we are once again playing Monopoly and Risk, and even making movies about it.
