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What ought to we anticipate 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 potentialities are infinite. And chilling.
Announced in a single day, Robbie’s Monopoly can 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 yr, a film that proved that a universally recognisable model could be mined for artistic potential, rating a raft of Oscar nominations, and make buckets and buckets of money.
But additionally: sigh. Monopoly joins a glut of toys at present being pulled from cabinets and tossed onto multiplex screens, from a “grounded and gritty” tackle Hot Wheels from JJ Abrams, to Lena Dunham and Lily Collins’ Polly Pocket collab, to a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots film starring Vin Diesel.
It was, inevitably, all the time going to be this fashion. Toy corporations like Mattel and Hasbro have been thumbing by means of their merchandise for years now within the hopes of turning them into movies, spurred on by Lego’s varied profitable forays onto the large display screen – 2014’s The Lego Movie drove up gross sales by 13 per cent – and additional inspired by Barbie’s international domination.
The lesson learnt from the film’s success wasn’t, seemingly, that audiences are drawn to novelty and shock on display screen, or that singular filmmakers like Greta Gerwig ought to be entrusted with massive budgets and the artistic freedom to do no matter they like with them, and even that we respect female-driven narratives. Rather, the lesson appears to be that folks wish to see issues they recognise – movies as nostalgia bait. And toys. Lots and plenty of toys.
It’s a weird assumption, provided that Barbie is very a lot an anomaly relating to hit toy films. Twelve years in the past, Hasbro produced Battleship, a bafflingly ugly-looking film primarily based on the favored board recreation. It had aliens in it, and Rihanna, and Taylor Kitsch, the most well liked main man in Hollywood for about six months in 2011. It additionally (…I needed to do it) sank on the field workplace, dropping Universal Pictures and Hasbro $150m (£120m) within the course of.
Then there was 1985’s Cluedo, a extra trustworthy adaptation of its board-game supply materials than no matter Battleship was, however a field workplace failure and a artistic and comedian wasteland all the identical. (While some folks declare that the film, starring the likes of Tim Curry and Christopher Lloyd, is a secret basic, relaxation assured – these persons are improper.)
Meanwhile, board-game films that really do work effectively are those who have taken inspiration from the spirit of board video games slightly than their specifics. Think Jumanji or the Jason Bateman/Rachel McAdams comedy Game Night, each of which zip together with the comedian pressure and journey that anybody will recognise from a few hours enjoying Risk.
Robbie’s Monopoly film, it ought to be stated, might not be a complete wash. She is a very, very sensible film producer, with a nice knack for locating scripts that claw their means into cultural discourse and develop into bona fide occasions. Both of her movies with Fennell – the 2020 rape-revenge thriller Promising Young Woman and final yr’s class satire Saltburn – have been swill, however they have been inescapable swill, fine-tuned to be polarising and argued over. In the pipeline is an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s dirty bestseller My Year of Rest and Relaxation that can inevitably break folks’s brains, and not less than two films 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 film that folks truly wish to see – then discuss, and despise or embrace – it’s Robbie. But I do query what she sees within the model past its title. Like the online game The Sims, which Robbie is additionally turning into a film by way of her manufacturing firm, Monopoly lacks the central pull that has all the time outlined the work she’s delivered to the display screen as a producer.
Speaking to Deadline earlier this yr, Robbie mentioned the sturdy 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 before they sat down and watched it,” she stated of the latter film. “That’s a really interesting place to start to share an experience with an audience.”
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. Where, although, is that inherent polarisation relating to Monopoly? Unless you’re a bit bizarre, does anybody even have a sturdy opinion about it, apart from that it all the time goes on a bit too lengthy?
More 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 new film off the bottom, and David Lynch revealed that Netflix rejected certainly one of his latest function pitches.
Are we actually OK to exist in a world through which studios boast of the franchise potential of one thing you performed with once you have been eight, however our biggest residing auteurs can’t get their work financed? If so, maybe it’s solely a matter of time earlier than Waters’s Hungry Hungry Hippos involves a cinema close to you.
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