Although none have managed to reach the screens yet, the coming of the board game movie is upon us: despite the concept essentially signifying the death of creativity in film, 2012 will see the release of both Peter Berg‘s “Battleship” and McG‘s “Ouija,” with the likes of “Monopoly” and “Candyland” still in the pipeline. One of the biggest properties in development is “Risk,” the wargame that’s been causing family arguments on rainy days for over fifty years, and unlike most of their films, which are in development at Universal, Hasbro have set up the film version at Sony and Will Smith‘s Overbrook Entertainment.
It’s been in the works for a while now, but word’s been blissfully quiet on the film, suggesting the project was on the back-burner. Unfortunately, there’s now some movement on the film, as Deadline report that fast-rising screenwriter John Hlavin has been hired to pen the script. Hlavin got his start as a story editor on “The Shield,” before gaining attention with his Black Listed script “The Gunslinger.” Since then, he’s written both “Underworld: New Dawn,” the fourth film in Screen Gems‘ interminable vampire franchise, and an untitled heist flick for Dreamworks and Steve Zaillian‘s production company Film Rites.
It sounds like the film will be a fairly loose adaptation of the game (which in its original form, “La Conquete du Monde” was invented by “The Red Balloon” director Albert Lamorisse: who knew?), abandoning the Napoleonic setting for “a contemporary global action thriller.” Whether this prevents the lead character acting the way that we do, and holing up in Australasia stocking up reinforcements, remains to be seen. There’s no intrinsic reason that this will be a terrible movie — Hlavin is certainly getting plenty of buzz around town — but at the same time, if someone happened to delete Hlavin’s copy of Final Draft, we wouldn’t exactly be devastated.