“B5.”
“Miss”.
“D12.”
“You son of a bitch, you sunk my Battleship. You totally cheated and looked at my board when I went to the bathroom didn’t you!!”
Sound familiar at all? Well, all of your childhood fantasies are becoming a reality… or a nightmare, depending on how you look at it. Back in 2008, Hasbro and Universal Pictures announced a deal that would give Universal the sole rights to make a minimum of four movies over a six-year time period based on some of Hasbro’s most popular brand names (with the glaring exception of Transformers and G.I. Joe, which had already been sold to Paramount). The first one to come to us is none other than the classic strategy board game Battleship. The trailer has surfaced (no pun intended), and might I say, it actually looks interesting.
Liam Neeson has taken a break from making good movies and being an all-around badass to headline the almost all-star cast, which also includes Alexander Skarsgard, Taylor Kitsch and Tadanobu Asano. Battleship appears to have everything you could hope for in a movie based on a board game – hot girls and alien spaceships shooting peg shaped missiles at battleships.
Yes, that’s right.
I said “alien spaceships shooting peg shaped missiles at various-sized battleships, all inside of an enclosed force field.”
Don’t believe me? See for yourself:
With Battleship already scheduled for release, that leaves at least three more movies to come, all of them with the potential to be just as awful as this. Looking through the Hasbro catalog, I certainly see some opportunities. Thankfully, there has already been a Clue movie (a bad-ass movie and personal favorite of mine, might I add) so hopefully that’s off the table. Here are my ideas for other Hasbro properties that might be making their way to the big screen.
Monopoly. I see this one playing out as a “mad dash for the cash” style movie, in the vein of Cannonball Run, Rat Race, or It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World. A group of random people would follow clues leading them from one destination to another, all over New York City, in an effort to obtain the ultimate prize, all while avoiding wacky cops and trying not to “go to jail.” Of course the film would culminate with a climactic scene on the Coney Island Boardwalk, where the eccentric billionaire who devised the contest would be waiting with the big payoff.
Ouija. This one is pretty obvious. A bunch of jackass, douchebag teenagers have a party in some old abandoned house that has some weird urban legend attached to it. In between gratuitous amounts of sex, drugs and boozing it up, they play with a Ouija board and summon some sort of demon or ghost that just so happens to be linked to the previously mentioned urban legend. We watch in amusement as they all die, one by one, until only two remain – the smoking hot popular girl and the twitchy, awkward nerdy guy. They stop the evil once and for all yadda, yadda, yadda – look. as long as there are boobs and a chainsaw I’ll give it a chance. But I’m going on record right now – if a movie based on a game that’s designed to communicate with spirits gets a PG-13 rating, I’m not going. That’s just blasphemous.
Candy Land. This will be some stupid chldren’s movie that will probably be a fusion of the Chronicles of Narnia meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Kids get transported into some magical “candy land” (haha see what I did there…of course you do) and have to help the Gumdrop King fight off the evil Fudge Lord’s horde of diabetes and save Wilfred Brimley or whatever the hell Candy Land was about. I’m not gonna lie to you, to this day I still don’t know dick about Candy Land, other than the fact that it was the game the girl that lived across the street from me as a child always wanted to play. I got her back though – I made her watch the first Puppet Master when we were both about 10, and she had to sleep with the lights on until she graduated high school. Make me play Pretty Pretty Princess? I’ll show you, you little bitch.
Operation. I see this being the most obvious choice for the heartfelt drama of the bunch. Maybe a lonely doctor fighting against all odds to save the life of a small boy or his wife or some mushy bullshit like that. Kinda like ER, but with Denzel Washington. But not the badass version of Denzel from Training Day or Virtuosity, more like the John Q version of Denzel. In my heart, I’d love to see this as a horror flick about a psychopathic surgeon who murders people, but I highly doubt it would ever top Dr.Giggles. I’m sure it would be better than The Dentist, but not Dr. Giggles.
There are plenty of other properties in the Hasbro vault, including Lite Bright, My Little Pony, Trivial Pursuit, Magic: The Gathering, NERF – the list just keeps going. Let me know what you think of my craptastic ideas, or whatever board-game-turned-movie ideas you can come up with. We’ll see who comes the closest when these train wrecks are eventually released.