I’ve got a bad habit of burying the lede, but not this time! Fox has acquired the rights to Magic: The Gathering for cinematic production. This is the coolest news. Since I was a little nerdy kid in middle school trying to work out the logistics of a Buried Alive deck, I have wanted this movie SO BAD. Simon Kinberg (X-Men, Fantastic Four) will be the one driving this airship into the future. For those of you who did things as children, Magic: The Gathering is a card game in which two players take the roles of wizards and use specifically constructed decks to defeat each other in epic, wondrous duels.
The thing about Magic: The Gathering is this. It takes place in an amazing world, with a deep and complex story. There are roughly a million novels based on the game, and some of them are pretty good. This raises the obvious question of whether the movies will draw on the established stories, or produce a new narrative out of the world. In this case, I think the books are the right call. Those stories actually follow an extremely cinematic arc, with many different adventures coming together in a final epic confrontation.
In reality, they should just tell the story of the Weatherlight and have Erza chilling in the background. Those are the coolest parts of the story. Deep cuts aside, this news marks the continuing ascendance of epic fantasy as a popular genre. With contemporary filmmaking technology what it is, this is a pretty obvious move. Warcraft is coming up soon, and this will soon join it. Finally, we’ll get the fantasy we deserve, and not this Hercules nonsense.
Source: HollywoodReporter