Hasbro is handing off the mystery of making a new Clue movie as it shops rights to a new adaptation of the murderous board game.
Hasbro Offers Studios a Clue
With a renewed interest in pushing toys and games as movie IP after Barbie’s success, Hasbro putting Clue (aka Cluedo for non-Americans) on the shop floor makes perfect sense given its murder mystery structure.
According to Jeff Sneider of The Insneider, Hasbro is offering up the rights for TV and film in hopes of using the IP for the first time in almost 40 years.
If somehow you’ve never played a game of Clue in your life, it sees players move around a board trying to determine which character is a murderer, where they did it, and with what instrument of death they committed the sordid deed.
It’s a tried and trusted formula to make a movie, and in recent years, we’ve had Rian Johnson’s Knives Out mysteries and Kenneth Branagh’s take on the legendary Poirot. In both cases, the cast tends to be nicely stacked with interesting actors. A Clue movie could do the same.
For good evidence of how well Clue works as a murder mystery caper, you need only look at Jonathan Lynn’s 1985 romp of the same name. That cast featured Tim Curry, Christopher Lloyd, Eileen Brennan (The Sting), and Madeline Kahn (Blazing Saddles). The film famously had three different outcomes shown in different theaters.
Ryan Reynolds had been attached to an adaptation a few years ago, but appears to have gotten lost in the Disney acquisition of 20th Century Fox, which had the rights since 2019. Percy Jackson director James Bobin had been down to direct it.
