Given all the board games that have been adapted into movies in the last year or so, shouldn't they have gotten to Risk a lot earlier? The geek-friendly, strategy-based board game mimics all the global wars we've fought over the centuries, and even the box art lends itself to epic battle scenes and the drama of marshaling your armies in Ukraine to attack Ural. Though we've waited a little longer to get the Risk movie in action, it's finally happened-- according to Deadline, Sony Picture has set John Hlavin to write Risk, for a project being produced by usual Will Smith collaborators Overbrook Entertainment.
Given the Overbrook involvement, and the fact that most Hasbro board game adaptations-- like Battleship and Candyland have been set up at Universal-- I invite you all to start speculating about Will Smith's potential involvement. You can also keep a close eye on Battleship, the Peter Berg-directed epic that will be the first huge board game adaptation to, er, test the waters. That movie opens on May 18 next year, and if it does well, you can guarantee Risk will make sure to be next in line. If it doesn't, we may never get to see the armies marching across the color-coded globe after all.
