10 Board Games Hollywood Should Adapt Into Movies

Hollywood is a town of trends. One year it’s war movies; the next, comic book movies; and now it seems like the entire movie industry has its eye on board games. The trend was already attempted once in 1985 with a movie based on the game Clue, but a shoddy script and way too much Tim Curry killed that momentum before it ever really got going.

But now that Battleship is ready to hit the big screen this Friday, movie studios everywhere are sure to be eyeing the box office reports to see if there's more money to milk out of the genre. Yet, the one thing that is evident from all of the movie’s trailers and commercials is that it doesn’t actually resemble the game all that much. There are no pegs in sight, and we certainly don’t remember anyone that resembles Brooklyn Decker, or aliens, for that matter, on the game’s box. But little things like that haven’t stopped Hollywood before, and we’re sure future board game movies will barely look anything like their cardboard and dice counterparts either.

We’ve decided that we're not going to fight it, though. In fact, we won’t just embrace it, we’ll actually add to it with our own ideas for board game-inspired movies; thus, we’re presenting 10 Board Games Hollywood Should Adapt Into Movies.

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Remember Mouse Trap? The irritatingly boring game that seemed to fall apart the minute your poor parents tried to put it together for you? Well, we don’t see how Dreamworks Animation wouldn’t just devour this concept and turn it into a feature-length animated movie featuring the voices of James Woods and Chris Rock.

It has everything a CGI-animated movie needs: anthropomorphized animals, whacky contraptions, and the opportunity to pretend like you’re not ripping off of Pixar for once.

Operation taught all of us the art of the steady hand, and also the belief that the human stomach is filled with butterflies. But the game shouldn’t end after children around the globe are done mimicking the actions of blood-covered surgeons—it should be turned into a serial killer thriller directed by David Fincher.

Here’s the plot: A woman comes home to discover that her husband has been killed and his ankle replaced by a wrench, or a “wrenched ankle.” A similar thing happens across town after a police officer was discovered dead in his home with a sewn-up stomach full of butterflies. It takes one of the police force’s youngest members to discover that these crimes are being committed in the same style as the board game Operation.

From there, a brutal series of crimes lead police on a chase to find this Milton-Bradley-obsessed sociopath before he strikes again. It sounds just like Se7en, right? Well, it would even look like it, especially when Morgan Freeman gets cast as one of the leads. Not as the hero cop, though, but as the killer himself. It’s about time he got his hands dirty.

A movie about a group of hippos with an insatiable appetite for small plastic balls might not sound feasible, but if a studio could hire Cloverfield director Matt Reeves to direct the project, we definitely see some possibilities. The original game might have been for kids, but we imagine a Hungry Hungry Hippos movie to be a 3D found footage monster flick about a group of genetically enhanced hippos that escape captivity and run amok in downtown Manhattan.

Where the original game centered on fun for the whole family, this movie would focus on the disembowelment of families at the hands (paws?) of these ravenous river pigs. With some fancy CGI, Hungry Hungry Hippos has everything that a studio exec could ever want. At the very least, it's sure to be better than 1998’s Godzilla.

Chutes and Ladders has seemingly been around forever, and it’s considered an absolute classic in the board game world. Unfortunately, classics mean nothing in the world of blockbuster movies (see I, Robot), so we can envision Hollywood adapting this into a gritty police thriller of some sort. Starring Al Pacino as Sgt. Chutes and Leonardo DiCaprio as Officer Ladders, this movie would feature the duo teaming up to take down a cocaine smuggling ring in the slums of Detroit.

Unfortunately, Ladders soon finds out that Chutes might know more about the smuggling ring than he’s letting on; as it turns out, Chutes has been on the take for years to pay for his wife's dialysis. Undeterred by his superior's sob story, this leads to a deadly game of cat and mouse between the clean rookie cop and the dirty veteran. Martin Scorsese should be all over this.

This one is a no-brainer. Risk is considered one of the most meticulous and intellectually-driven board games on the market. Like Battleship, its focus is on strategy and well-thought-out movements to try and outfox your adversary. So Hollywood should do what it does best and turn the game into an out-and-out mindless action movie starring Channing Tatum and Jessica Biel.

Directed by the supreme hack Stephen Sommers (Van Helsing, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra), Riskcould focus on the Earth battling it out against an alien invasion during the Revolutionary War. Forced to become allies with the British, the original 13 colonies, led by Tatum as George Washington, would rally the world to work together to stop the intergalactic threat.

Think of it like The Patriot mixed with Independence Day, but somehow worse than what you’re imagining. Still, we would love to see Biel show off some ankle as Martha Washington.

By its very definition, The Game of Life is an existential way to pass time. It's designed to bring a player through their entire life, from college to old age, with just the roll of the dice. Along the way, people can enjoy the thrills of marriage, jobs, and having children. The winner of the game is the first one to reach retirement; we suppose it doesn’t make sense if the finish line that everyone is rushing towards is death.

There was already a movie released last year that meditated on the concept of life in such a concise way: Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. It only makes sense to back a dump truck full of money onto the eccentric director’s lawn and have him come back for some more avant-garde zaniness. It could be filled with long shots of sunflowers, rusty fences, and inexplicable footage of the cosmos. Hell, he could even toss in a few aliens and Woolly Mammoths along the way if that makes him happy.

By the end, audiences would be so embarrassed to admit that they had no idea what was going on that they would instantly rave about it. And that’s when the awards come flooding in.

What better way is there to teach your daughter about the importance of dating numerous men at an early age and judging people solely on their appearance than Mystery Date? Basically, if you won the game, you went on a date with the stud, a.k.a. the football jock; if you lost, you take home the dud, a.k.a. the nerd. To flip this whole concept on its head, we would love to see a Mystery Date movie based on what happened to two girls after one landed the stud and the other one got the dud.

Although the stud was the hunk in high school, in the movie he's now in his mid '40s and working as a delivery boy for his father’s menu laminating company. This means that his wife is forced to work her fingernails bloody just to make ends meet. On the other hand, the dud wound up creating a new painless delivery system for insulin and struck it rich. He may not be handsome, but the other girl couldn't be happier with him.

It would be a typical Woody Allen-esque morality play about the dangers of judging your romantic interests solely by their looks. It could even send a positive message to the youth of America for a change. Imagine that.

We’re going to make this one real easy. The approach to our Twister movie is as follows: Cast Scarlett Johansson, Megan Fox, Mila Kunis, Natalie Portman, and Rihanna, hook them up with a few boxes of wine, and simply let them play Twister.

No plots, no dialogue, and no reason to use our brains. Hire Michael Bay as the director and you’ve got yourself two hours of smutty entertainment that's guaranteed to break box office records. Somehow, we can still see this thing having a budget over $200 million, though.

For those who never played it, Guess Who? is, yes, a guessing game that forces players to read their opponents' face and deduce the identity of the card that they're holding through a series of yes-or-no questions. You know who else likes these kinds of mind-bending puzzles? Christopher Nolan.

A small fortune and about a billion shares of studio stock later, we could have a psychological thriller based on Guess Who? directed by the man who did Memento. He could even cast Guy Pearce as the amnesiac forced to ask only yes-or-no inquiries to find the identity of his wife's killer. And in typical Nolan fashion, the big plot twist at the end can come from the fact that the amnesiac never even had a wife. Spooky stuff, right?

Sure, there would be a lot more gunfire and foul language than the original board game had, but if Nolan could save the Batman franchise from the neon-colored clutches of Joel Schumacher, he could probably turn Guess Who? into an Oscar contender.

We know a Monopoly movie was in development a few years ago, with Ridley Scott attached to direct, but there hasn’t been much talk about it in a few years. However, that doesn’t mean the idea should be abandoned. With the current economic malaise sweeping through the world, Monopoly actually has the potential to be the most socially-relevant board game adaptation imaginable. That’s right, we said it. Socially relevant.

Taking place in a world where only one corporation has survived the Great Recession, Monopoly could focus squarely on Rich Uncle Pennybags’ plot to buy America. Pennybags would, of course, have to be played by a mustachioed Ben Kingsley, while Shia LaBeouf could play his young, liberal-minded adversary, who also happens to be his nephew.

Think of it as the Wall Street sequel that Oliver Stone didn't have the guts to make. Unfortunately, we can’t think of a way to include the boot and the thimble into this whole experiment, but, hey, you have to draw the line somewhere.