It looks like Hollywood’s going diving into the classic board game seas for inspiration again, as Sony Pictures has apparently nabbed bigscreen rights to the board game Risk from Hasbro according to Variety. Will Smith and James Lassiter’s Overbrook Entertainment will produce the film alongside the studio.
Risk pits players against one another in a quest to annex all of the world’s territories. The game was created in 1957 by French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse as La Conquete du Monde (The Conquest of the World). Two years later, Parker Brothers published the game in the U.S. and dubbed it Risk.
The deal comes on the heels of box office gold for Paramount’s adaptations of Hasbro’s Transformers and G.I. Joe.
According to the report, as Studios become more risk-averse, toys with name recognition and limitless branding opportunities are being developed as adaptations with A-list producers attached. Proof of this are the myriad other Hasbro properties currently on the big budget production slate, including Monopoly, Ouija, Stretch Armstrong and Candyland. Also, last year Universal tapped Peter Berg (The Kingdom, The Rundown, Hancock) to helm a big screen version of Battleship and has picked July 1, 2011 as the release date.