Sony Pictures has landed the TV and film rights to the board game that was turned into the iconic 1985 movie starring Tim Curry.

Sony Pictures Television and TriStar Pictures closed the competitive deal with Hasbro Entertainment, which has been shopping the rights about over the last few months following its split with eOne.

The move will give the studio the rights to take another turn at rebooting the movie and adapting it for a series.

The black comedy was directed by Jonathan Lynn, who wrote the script with John Landis. Starring Curry as Wadsworth the butler, it centered around a group of strangers invited to a secluded mansion where things go wrong and featured Eileen Brennan as Mrs. Peacock, Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White, Christopher Lloyd as Professor Plum, Michael McKean as Mr. Green, Martin Mull as Colonel Mustard, Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet, Colleen Camp as French maid Yvette and Fear’s Lee Ving as Mr. Boddy.

Produced by Debra Hill, it infamously featured a number of different endings.

There have been a number of attempts to reboot Clue both in film and television.

In 2011, Universal Studios revealed it was setting up a new movie, then Hasbro teamed yp with Gore Verbinski. Fox attempted a version in 2016, Ryan Reynolds was at one point planning to star in a version, with Jason Bateman in talks to direct. The latest attempt in film came from director James Bobin in 2020 and Oren Uziel was hired to write a script.

On the television front, The Amber Ruffin Show’s Dewayne Perkins was developing an animated version for Fox with Tim Story as exec producer. That project came from Hasbro’s eOne and Fox’s Bento Box Entertainment but was never greenlit.

Sony Pictures Television now has the rights to develop scripted and unscripted television projects

It is the latest deal for Hasbro since Lionsgate acquired eOne in a $500M deal last year. The toy company struck a deal with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap, which was behind smash hit Barbie, for the rights to turn Monopoly into a movie with Lionsgate.

Hasbro Heads of Film and TV Zev Foreman and Gabriel Marano said, “Sony is the perfect partner to adapt a property as culturally impactful and mystery-defining as Clue. Nicole Brown, Katherine Pope, and their teams are tremendous creative collaborators and ideal partners to help us figure out after 75 years if it was Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick.”

Credit: Peter White, Deadline, 23rd April 2024