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What ought to we count on from Margot Robbie’s Monopoly film? Metaphors for the evils of capitalism? Dastardly landlords waging warfare on younger renters? Emerald Fennell as a gender-flipped Mr Moneybags? The chances are infinite. And chilling.
Introduced in a single day, Robbie’s Monopoly will likely be a live-action tackle the basic board recreation, and a collaboration between Lionsgate, the toymakers at Hasbro, and Robbie’s manufacturing firm LuckyChap. It’s one other daring play by Robbie following Barbie final 12 months, a film that proved {that a} universally recognisable model might be mined for inventive potential, rating a raft of Oscar nominations, and make buckets and buckets of money.
But additionally: sigh. Monopoly joins a glut of toys presently being pulled from cabinets and tossed onto multiplex screens, from a “grounded and gritty” tackle Sizzling Wheels from JJ Abrams, to Lena Dunham and Lily Collins’ Polly Pocket collab, to a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie starring Vin Diesel.
It was, inevitably, all the time going to be this manner. Toy firms like Mattel and Hasbro have been thumbing by way of their merchandise for years now within the hopes of turning them into movies, spurred on by Lego’s varied profitable forays onto the massive display – 2014’s The Lego Film drove up gross sales by 13 per cent – and additional inspired by Barbie’s world domination.
The lesson learnt from the movie’s success wasn’t, seemingly, that audiences are drawn to novelty and shock on display, or that singular filmmakers like Greta Gerwig needs to be entrusted with huge budgets and the inventive freedom to do no matter they like with them, and even that we respect female-driven narratives. Somewhat, the lesson appears to be that folks wish to see issues they recognise – movies as nostalgia bait. And toys. Heaps and many toys.
It’s a weird assumption, provided that Barbie could be very a lot an anomaly in relation to hit toy motion pictures. Twelve years in the past, Hasbro produced Battleship, a bafflingly ugly-looking film based mostly on the favored board recreation. It had aliens in it, and Rihanna, and Taylor Kitsch, the most popular main man in Hollywood for about six months in 2011. It additionally (…I needed to do it) sank on the field workplace, dropping Common Photos and Hasbro $150m (£120m) within the course of.
Then there was 1985’s Cluedo, a extra devoted adaptation of its board-game supply materials than no matter Battleship was, however a field workplace failure and a inventive and comedian wasteland all the identical. (Whereas some folks declare that the film, starring the likes of Tim Curry and Christopher Lloyd, is a secret basic, relaxation assured – these persons are flawed.)
In the meantime, board-game motion pictures that truly do work effectively are those who have taken inspiration from the spirit of board video games moderately than their specifics. Assume Jumanji or the Jason Bateman/Rachel McAdams comedy Sport Night time, each of which zip together with the comedian pressure and journey that anybody will recognise from a couple of hours taking part in Danger.
Robbie’s Monopoly film, it needs to be stated, is probably not a complete wash. She is a really, very sensible movie producer, with an excellent knack for locating scripts that claw their means into cultural discourse and turn into bona fide occasions. Each of her movies with Fennell – the 2020 rape-revenge thriller Promising Younger Girl and final 12 months’s class satire Saltburn – have been swill, however they have been inescapable swill, fine-tuned to be polarising and argued over. Within the pipeline is an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s dirty bestseller My Yr of Relaxation and Rest that can inevitably break folks’s brains, and at the very least two motion pictures to be directed by Olivia Wilde – a strolling thinkpiece if ever there was one.
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If anybody can flip Monopoly into a movie that folks truly wish to see – then speak about, and despise or embrace – it’s Robbie. However I do query what she sees within the model past its title. Just like the online game The Sims, which Robbie can be turning right into a film by way of her manufacturing firm, Monopoly lacks the central pull that has all the time outlined the work she’s dropped at the display as a producer.
Chatting with Deadline earlier this 12 months, Robbie mentioned the robust opinions that encompass Barbie as an entity, in addition to the disgraced determine skater Tonya Harding – who she performed within the 2017 film I, Tonya. “Audiences [had] a built-in perspective of our protagonist earlier than they sat down and watched it,” she stated of the latter movie. “That’s a very attention-grabbing place to begin to share an expertise with an viewers.”
That pressure fuels each of the films Robbie ended up making, and feeds into the divisive responses to her collaborations with Fennell. All of it has paid off in spades, too. The place, although, is that inherent polarisation in relation to Monopoly? Until you’re a bit bizarre, does anybody actually have a robust opinion about it, apart from that it all the time goes on a bit too lengthy?
Greater than something, I can’t assist however really feel underwhelmed by the prospect. The information of Robbie’s Monopoly film broke in the identical week that Francis Ford Coppola’s new, self-funded Megalopolis reportedly turned off potential patrons at a secret screening in Los Angeles. John Waters additionally stated in an interview this week that he’s struggling to get a brand new movie off the bottom, and David Lynch revealed that Netflix rejected certainly one of his latest characteristic pitches.
Are we actually OK to exist in a world by which studios boast of the franchise potential of one thing you performed with while you have been eight, however our biggest residing auteurs can’t get their work financed? If that’s the case, maybe it’s solely a matter of time earlier than Waters’ Hungry Hungry Hippos involves a cinema close to you.
