What ought to we anticipate from Margot Robbie’s Monopoly film? Metaphors for the evils of capitalism? Dastardly landlords waging struggle on younger renters? Emerald Fennell as a gender-flipped Mr Moneybags? The probabilities are countless. And chilling.
Introduced in a single day, Robbie’s Monopoly can be a live-action tackle the basic board sport, 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.
However, additionally: sigh. Monopoly joins a glut of toys presently being pulled from cabinets and tossed onto multiplex screens, from a “grounded and gritty” tackle Scorching 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, at all times going to be this manner. Toy corporations 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 large display – 2014’s The Lego Film drove up gross sales by 13 per cent – and additional inspired by Barbie’s international 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 must be entrusted with large budgets and the artistic freedom to do no matter they like with them, and even that we admire female-driven narratives. Somewhat, the lesson appears to be that folks need to see issues they recognise – movies as nostalgia bait. And toys. Heaps and many toys.
It’s a weird assumption, on condition that Barbie may be very a lot an anomaly in relation to hit toy films. Twelve years in the past, Hasbro produced Battleship, a bafflingly ugly-looking film primarily based on the favored board sport. 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, shedding Common Photos and Hasbro $150m within the course of.
Then there was 1985’s Cluedo, a extra devoted adaptation of its board sport supply materials than no matter Battleship was, however a field workplace failure and a artistic 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 individuals are improper.)
In the meantime, board sport films that really do work nicely are people who have taken inspiration from the spirit of board video games moderately than their specifics. Assume Jumanji or the Jason Bateman/Rachel McAdams comedy Recreation Night time, each of which zip together with the comedian rigidity and journey that anybody will recognise from just a few hours taking part in Danger.
Robbie’s Monopoly film, it must be mentioned, will not be a complete wash. She is a really, very sensible movie producer, with a fantastic knack for locating scripts that claw their method into cultural discourse and develop into bona fide occasions. Each of her movies with Fennell – the 2020 rape-revenge thriller Promising Younger Girl and final yr’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 Leisure that may inevitably break folks’s brains, and at the least two films to be directed by Olivia Wilde – a strolling assume piece if ever there was one.
If anybody can flip Monopoly into a movie that folks truly need to see – then discuss, and despise, or embrace – it’s Robbie. However I do query what she sees within the model past its identify. Just like the online game The Sims, which Robbie can also be turning right into a film through her manufacturing firm, Monopoly lacks the central pull that has at all times outlined the work she’s delivered to the display as a producer.
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Chatting with 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 earlier than they sat down and watched it,” she mentioned of the latter movie. “That’s a very fascinating place to begin to share an expertise with an viewers.”
That rigidity fuels each of the flicks Robbie ended up making, and feeds into the divisive responses to her collaborations with Emerald Fennell. All of it has paid off in spades, too. The place, although, is that inherent polarisation in relation to Monopoly? Except you’re a bit bizarre, does anybody also have a sturdy opinion about it, aside from that it at all times 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 consumers at a secret screening in Los Angeles. John Waters additionally mentioned 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 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 while you have been eight, however our best dwelling auteurs can’t get their work financed? In that case, maybe it’s solely a matter of time earlier than John Waters’s Hungry Hungry Hippos is coming to a cinema close to you.
