Play-Doh will be the latest Hasbro product to get the big screen treatment. No, really. The Big Sick writer Emily V. Gordon will pen the script, while Jon M. Chu (In The Heights, Crazy Rich Asians) is producing with an eye to direct.
Play-Doh, a modeling compound for young children to make arts and crafts projects, is the number one arts & crafts toy brand and is sold in more than 80 countries. “The team looks forward to bringing the audience a moldable, pliable, iconically scented story about the importance of imagination,” Chu and Gordon said in a joint statement.
This is just the latest Hasbro project to be adapted to film since eOne acquired the company back in 2019. Production recently wrapped on Dungeons & Dragons, which is set to arrive in March 2023, while two separate Transformers projects are in the works – one live-action, the other animated.
There’s also a new Power Rangers film in the works, along with big screen versions of games Clue, Mouse Trap, and Ouija. On the TV side of things, there’s also an adaptation of popular board game Risk in the works, along with an animated version of Magic: The Gathering.
Gordon and Chu are excellent behind-the-camera talents, but even they might have trouble making a successful film based off a children’s modeling compound. eOne and Hasbro’s film projects have always reeked of a slight desperation to develop anything based off IP with bare minimum name value, but on the surface this sounds like a comically desperate idea.
Then again, many people said similar things about The LEGO Movie almost a decade ago now, and that was a genuinely enjoyable hit. The success of that film has been the catalyst for many of the based-on-toys projects since, so hopefully Gordon and Chu can take the right lessons from that film and focus on the inherent creativity at the heart of Play-Doh.
We’ll wait and see what the actual Play-Doh plot will revolve around, and whether Gordon and Chu can work their magic to avoid it ending up as another failed LEGO Movie ripoff like Playmobil: The Movie, which thoroughly bombed at the box office and was widely considered the worst movie of 2019.
#Peace.Love.PlayDoh
