How to turn a board game into a movie? Go a leetle beet crazee...

They're those bemusing news stories you read, but lack the will or inclination to fully process, such is their apparent stark-staring lunacy. 'Ridley Scott to direct Monopoly movie', 'Battleship set to sail onto big screen', 'Samuel L. Jackson to star in Hungry Hippos*'. But we are now finally beginning to learn more about how these board games are going to make the leap into movie theatres.

Sir Ridley's Monopoly project has been gestating at Universal for a while now and, in terms of audience pre-release excitement, it has been very much the frosty nadir when compared to the supernova apex generated by the director's announced new Aliens movie. However, that could all possibly change (though almost certainly won't), as producer Frank Beddor has been speaking to the LA Times about the Monopoly story concept with which he successfully hooked in Scott's highly-valued involvement.

Beddor, author of the Lewis Carroll-reimagining Looking Glass Wars book trilogy and a producer on There's Something About Mary, explains that 'The project was underway but they were in a little bit of trouble I guess and they were looking for a way to actually turn it into a movie. I had a pretty interesting take and it got Sir Ridley interested...'

So what was Beddor's pitch that so effectively seduced the man behind Blade Runner and Gladiator? Well, here goes (and I would advise against holding your breath in anticipation of the point where Beddor's story suddenly mutates into a work of narrative ingenuity. Because you will asphyxiate. Or at the very least, pass out and bang your head on your keyboard);

“I created a comedic, lovable loser who lives in Manhattan and works at a real estate company and he's not very good at his job but he's great at playing Monopoly. And the world record for playing is 70 straight days – over 1,600 hours – and he wanted to try and convince his friends to help him break the world record. They think he is crazy. They kid him about this girl and they're playing the game and there's this big fight. And he's holding a Chance card and after they've left he says, 'Damn, I wanted to use that Chance card', and he throws it down. He falls asleep and then he wakes up in the morning and he's holding the Chance card, and he thinks 'That's odd'.”

“He's all groggy and he goes down to buy some coffee and he reaches into his pocket and all he has is Monopoly money. All this Monopoly money pours out. He's confused and embarrassed and the girl reaches across the counter and says 'That's OK.' And she gives him his change in Monopoly money. He walks outside and he's in this very vibrant place, Monopoly city, and he's just come out of a Chance Shop. As it goes on, he takes on the evil Parker Brothers in the game of Monopoly. He has to defeat them. It tries to incorporate all the iconic imageries – a sports car pulls up, there's someone on a horse, someone pushing a wheelbarrow – and rich Uncle Pennybags (moustachioed embodiment of capitalism, destined to be first against the wall when the revolution comes), you're going to see him as the maître d' at the restaurant and he's the buggy driver and the local eccentric and the doorman at the opera. There's all these sight gags.”

Continues Beddor; “That's where Sir Ridley got excited. After I pitched it to him, he put out his hand and said, 'What do I have to do to be part of this movie?'”, thus confirming that the British film-making knight of the realm must have been in an exceptionally good mood on the day Beddor caught him. Corpse Bride and 9 screenwriter Pamela Pettler has been charged with knocking Beddor's story into a workable script.

Universal clearly have board game fever at present, with Hancock director Peter Berg currently prepping a cinematic take on Battleship, ahead of a scheduled 5 August 2011 release date. And the proposed plot for that flick is apparently no less nutty than Beddor's Monopoly magnum opus, with Latino Review reporting earlier this week that Berg's Battleship will see a five-ship fleet taking on an extraterrestrial menace. It is quite reasonable to say “Why not aliens?”, when the game has no real story tenets to speak of. But in that case, why have Universal saddled themselves with the Battleship name at all, rather than come up with an original property?

Clearly even comic books and action figures have become far too dull and predictable for those madcap movie folk, and board games seem the next big thing for them to throw wads of production cash at. Not that the previous highest profile board game-adap was a roaring success – the Tim Curry-starring, triple-ended Clue stiffing on release in 1985. Yet even that game is on the movie comeback trail, with Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski attached to helm. Where will the madness end? David Cronenberg's Scrabble? Seth Rogen in Buckaroo? Steven Spielberg directing an all-star version of Operation, with Shia LaBeouf as the wrenched ankle and Simon Pegg as the bread basket? For now, we can only wonder.

*this last one is not a real movie... yet!