EXCLUSIVE: 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 flesh out ideas for a Monopoly movie based on the iconic board game, sources tell Deadline.
Rebecca Angelo and Lauren Schuker Blum
Emilio Madrid
Studio insiders stressed that it’s still very early days here and there’s no telling which way things go with this project. But we’re told they’ve been presented with two outlines and will commission one script from there. Stay tuned to see where this one lands.
Neil Widener and Gavin James
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Attempts at development on a Monopoly movie stretch back decades — over a decade, alone, in Lionsgate’s case. The studio’s most recent work on Monopoly 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 and Night School 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 that 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. This is, of course, the real-estate board game where 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, as we first reported.
Neil Widener & Gavin James are known for writing Warner Bros.’ phenomenon A Minecraft Moviethe biggest video-game adaptation 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 also worked on a film based on the Beyblade toy franchise for producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Last year, the duo sold their original feature pitch, Fortuneto 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 franchise Jak & Daxter for Sony/PlayStation with Ruben Fleischer attached to direct. They are represented by CAA, Untitled Entertainment, and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole.
Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum are the writers of the Craig Gillespie-helmed Dumb Moneyon 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 Riseabout 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. They are repped by CAA, LBI Entertainment, and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern.
