"Monopoly" Movie Gets Update

Lionsgate, LuckyChap, and Hasbro Entertainment are partnering with two star writing teams — Neil Widener & Gavin James (A Minecraft Movie) and Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum (Dumb Money) — to craft ideas for a Monopoly movie based on the iconic board game.

Studio insiders revealed that it’s still very early days, and there’s no telling which way things go with the project, however they’ve been presented with two outlines and will commission one script from there.

Attempts at development on a Monopoly movie go back to decades — over a decade, alone, in Lionsgate’s case.

The studio’s most recent work on the adaptation comes following its 2023 acquisition of eOne from Hasbro, which gave it access to a library of 6,500 film and television titles.

While Hasbro retained rights to many of its biggest pieces of IP — like "Transformers" and "Dungeons & Dragons" — they sweetened the deal by affording Lionsgate the right to develop Monopoly for the big screen.

Lionsgate announced LuckyChap’s involvement at CinemaCon in 2024 on the heels of their blockbuster success with "Barbie".

The project gained further momentum when they attached John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein to pen a script in March 2025, which did not go forward.

Lionsgate first took a stab at adapting "Monopoly" in 2015, enlisting Golden Globe nominee Andrew Niccol to pen a script.

Later, they developed another take with Kevin Hart, which would have had him reunite with his "Ride Along" collaborator, Tim Story.

The push to bring Monopoly to the big screen began in 2008, when Universal set a six-year strategic partnership with Hasbro to produce films based on its iconic game and toy brands.

Ridley Scott was adapted to direct at one point, though the box office failure of 2012’s Battleship took the wind out of Universal’s sails when it came to its game-to-film initiative with Hasbro.

The company reclaimed rights to Monopoly after its Universal deal expired, with producer Randall Emmett briefly attempting to get a Monopoly movie off the ground thereafter.

The world’s most popular board game brand, with 99% global awareness, Monopoly has sold nearly half a billion copies going back to 1935 and is available in more than 100 countries across the globe.

In the real-estate game, the players attempt to bankrupt opponents through the buying, renting, and trading of properties.

In tandem with development on the feature, Hasbro Entertainment has recently progressed development on an unscripted Monopoly series for Netflix, with Studio Lambert — the production company behind Peacock’s hit game show "The Traitors" — winning a bake-off to produce as of February.

Neil Widener & Gavin James are known for writing Warner Bros.’ phenomenon "A Minecraft" Movie, one of the biggest video-game adaptations of all time, which opened to a record-breaking $163M and eventually grossed over $960M.

They also write the upcoming A Minecraft Sequel and have worked on a film based on the "Beyblade" toy franchise for producer Jerry Bruckheimer.

Last year, the duo sold their original feature pitch, Fortune, to Skydance in a competitive situation with Jerry Bruckheimer attached to produce and Alan Ritchson attached to star.

They’re also currently adapting the Neal Shusterman short story “Dawn” for Netflix with Dylan Clark producing, as well as the video game "Jak & Daxter" for Sony/PlayStation with Ruben Fleischer attached to direct.

Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum are the writers of the Craig Gillespie-helmed "Dumb Money," the Sony film on the GameStop short squeeze of January 2021, and Universal’s upcoming "Murder She Wrote," starring Jamie Lee Curtis.

Writing film & TV together since 2012, they first met as reporters at The Wall Street Journal.

Other upcoming projects include Rise, about the historic women’s national basketball team that paved the way for the creation of the WNBA, and the feature biopic of talent agent Sue Mengers that’s set up at Apple TV with Jennifer Lawrence starring.

They’re exec producers there and are also currently developing a series with Aggregate for Netflix.