Just when you thought Hollywood had sworn off movies based on board games, The Settlers of Catan becomes the next project to make the leap from the table to the big screen.
The Perfect Storm and Air Force One producer Gail Katz has acquired the film and television rights to the popular game, according to Deadline, with plans to turn it into a feature film.
“I’ve been wanting to see an adaptation of the game for years ever since my Catan-obsessed college-aged kids introduced me to it,” said Katz in a statement accompanying the announcement. “The island of Catan is a vivid, visual, exciting and timeless world with classic themes and moral challenges that resonate today. There is a tremendous opportunity to take what people love about the game and its mythology as a starting point for the narrative.”
First published in 1995, The Settlers of Catan is a strategy-based game that has players competing to become the dominant community on the fictional island of Catan, where they must make clever use of the resources and outwit neighboring players’ communities in order to survive. The game quickly became a mainstream, global sensation, with over 22 million versions of the game sold worldwide and translated into 30 languages. In 2010, it was declared “the board game of our time” by The Washington Post.
It’s unknown what form the adaptation of the game will take when it’s brought to the screen, or if there’s any timetable associated with development of the film or a potential TV series — so it’s uncertain whether audiences will get something along the lines of Clue or something more akin to (shudder) Battleship.
