Recent video game adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout have finally buried the video game curse, but board games are another story altogether. You don’t need to look further than Battleship to see how a simple game can prove impossible to make into a compelling movie, but in 1985, Clue turned unlikely source material into the perfect adaptation.
A raucous mystery comedy that fleshes out the colorful game characters, Clue received mixed reviews and struggled at the box office, but won over cable and rental audiences and has since become something of a cult classic. Now, almost 40 years later, the quirky story could get multiple remakes.
Clue has a stacked cast that includes Michael McKean, Christopher Lloyd, and Madeline Kahn.
According to Variety, Sony has purchased the rights to adapt Clue into movies and TV shows. There’s precedent for the game being adapted into multiple mediums: aside from the 1985 movie, it’s also been turned into a British game show boasting names like Tom Baker and Joanna Lumley, and a 2011 miniseries that made the game into a Riverdale-esque teen drama.
There’s no word as to what, if anything, is currently in development, but any future creators will have to match Clue’s ingenuity. Famously, three different endings were distributed to theaters, meaning different audiences saw different solutions to the murder. In home releases, and now on streaming, all three endings play consecutively.
Clue’s different endings provide an element of surprise that’s perfect for streaming.
The strategy was seen as gimmicky, but in the streaming age, it would echo projects like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Kaleidoscope, which used the personalization and interactivity of streaming media to their benefit. Should Sony choose to develop a straight-to-streaming remake, it could give each viewer a random ending, or let viewers weigh in on the finale.
While the adaptations Sony is developing may not be a direct remake of Clue, any project will inevitably be compared to the movie. With its reputation having improved significantly since its initial release, now’s as good a time as any to pay homage to its cleverness while updating the humor for the 21st century. Maybe, if these new Clue projects go well, the upcoming Monopoly movie can learn a thing or two.
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