For quite a while now, Sony has owned the right to the board game Risk, with the idea of turning it into a movie. While with some toys and game you can understand why a studio would need the rights (such as Masters Of The Universe), Risk – in which players try to annex the territories of the world – doesn’t really have enough plot or character to really need it. As with the upcoming Battleship, it’s merely the recognisable name Sony has paid for.
While it does seem pretty daft to retrofit a movie around a character-less board game, the studio is now moving forward, hiring John Hlavin (Underworld: New Dawn, TVs The Shield) to pen the script. Little is know about the prospective plot, although THR says it will be a modern day “global action thriller” based on the game. What’s the betting aliens will be involved, trying to take over the world?
The real question is whether the film will be made, and it’s likely that will be down to whether the May 2012 launch of Battleship is a success. Hollywood will likely see that as a test of whether its worth making movies out of properties that offer little more than a known name, even if the film itself will live and die on whether it’s any good, rather than if there’s a decades old board-game it’s tangentially attached to.
But if Battleship does hit it big, expect the planned Monopoly, Cluedo, Masters Of The Universe, Lego, Stretch Armstrong, Barbie, Viewmaster and Risk films (the likes of Ouija should shoot this year anyway) to all get a big push towards production.