Start dream-casting for the thimble now.
Last summer you wore your best pink get-ups to go see Barbie, now get ready to don your finest top hat and monocle: Margot Robbie is producing a Monopoly movie. Lionsgate announced that it’d be teaming up with Robbie’s LuckyChap production company at CinemaCon on Wednesday, where, according to Variety, the audience full of theater owners “loudly cheered at the news.”
This announcement comes on the heels of the news that Robbie will also be producing a Sims movie. The woman loves gaming! Perhaps more specifically, she has found a formula that she believes will work every time. Take a piece of intellectual property from people’s childhoods, and then profit. This led to nearly $2 billion for Barbie, and Robbie and her producing team are clearly hoping to recreate the success with both the game that turns everyone in your family against each other and the game that taught an entire generation of women about WooHooing.
At CinemaCon, Lionsgate chair Adam Fogelson told the crowd that LuckyChap has “a clear point of view” on what the Monopoly movie will be. Based on nothing, here’s my guess as to what that point of view is. A naïve young woman is radicalized when she gets a job working for real-estate developer Rich Uncle Pennybags and realizes that the entire game of capitalism is rigged in favor of the one percent. She decides to try and take him down from the inside, but once she starts making money herself she faces the decision whether to hold onto her morals or blow them off in favor of cold hard cash. Yadda yadda yadda, she comes to an important conclusion on the boardwalk, there’s a cheeky visual joke where she passes a big sign that says “GO,” and at the end Rich Uncle Pennnybags is in jail. The only thing left to do is think of which 20th-century historical figure we can pair this with. Maybe Henry Ford? Fordopoly weekend?
