Lionsgate Taps Two Writing Teams for Monopoly Movie
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- Lionsgate, LuckyChap, and Hasbro Entertainment have brought on Neil Widener & Gavin James and Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum to develop two competing outlines for a Monopoly movie, with one script to be commissioned from there
- Lionsgate has attempted to adapt Monopoly for over a decade, including a 2015 script by Andrew Niccol, a Kevin Hart/Tim Story take, and a March 2025 draft by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein that did not go forward
- Lionsgate gained Monopoly film rights as part of its 2023 eOne acquisition from Hasbro, which gave it access to 6,500 titles; Hasbro retained rights to Transformers and Dungeons & Dragons but carved out Monopoly for Lionsgate
- Neil Widener & Gavin James wrote A Minecraft Movie, which opened to a record-breaking $163M and grossed over $960M worldwide, and are also writing its sequel
- Rebecca Angelo & Lauren Schuker Blum wrote Dumb Money for Sony and are scripting Universal's Murder She Wrote with Jamie Lee Curtis; the pair first met as Wall Street Journal reporters
- Hasbro Entertainment is separately developing an unscripted Monopoly series for Netflix, with Studio Lambert — the production company behind The Traitors — winning a bake-off to produce as of February
Why it matters: Lionsgate is hedging with two competing outlines after its March 2025 Monopoly script fell through, recruiting the $960M-grossing Minecraft Movie writers and the Dumb Money scribes — a serious vote of confidence in an IP the studio has tried to crack for over a decade. The Monopoly game itself carries 99% global awareness and nearly 500 million copies sold since 1935, making it a high-upside adaptation target if any version finally gets greenlit.
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