I really, really wish we could stamp out this trend before it even starts, but it appears it’s too late. I read this little snippet in an article about the upcoming Battleship movie that I didn’t know existed.

“Universal has several board game titles in development as part of its six-year deal with Hasbro. “Ouija Board” is being produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes shingle, “Candy Land” has Kevin Lima attached to direct with Etan Cohen writing the script, and Ridley Scott is developing a project based on “Monopoly.”

Yes, that’s right, we’re getting not only a Battleship movie, but Ouija Board, Candy Land and Monopoly movies as well. I had heard about Ridley Scott’s Monopoly project before, but I thought I was reading an Onion article so I didn’t think anything of it.

But seriously, look Hollywood, I understand that writing movies is hard. You need an idea, and a plot, and characters, and things like books and video games and comics and other movies and toys give you most of those things right off the bat so it’s easier to adapt them into a film, but that doesn’t mean you should. And now we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel with board games. I’m not sure where we’ll go when we run out of those. I guess we’ll start making movies based on cereal box cartoons (Revenge of Trix Rabbit) or commercial characters (Geicko’s Gecko 3-D!). I’m not sure the industry will survive, or my sanity along with it.

• I Wish I Was Joking: Peter Berg May Direct “Battleship”
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• Listen to Peter Berg Try to Justify His ‘Battleship’ Movie
• The Morning Link: The Worst Assignment Ever
• Please Don’t Be True: Ron Howard to Direct ‘Stretch Armstrong’

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