Michael Bay To Put His Fingers on the Ouija

Posted by Josh Radde (josh@filmschoolrejects.com) on May 30, 2008

And if that sounds disgusting, well, it just might be.

Michael Bay, in all his holiness, and his production company Platinum Dunes have plans to make the popular spirit-seeking boardgame Ouija into a feature film. But according to The Hollywood Reporter, we’re not looking at Jumanji or Zathura 2, but instead it could be something like a Ouija board used as a plot device to spring-board a supernatural thriller.

The script, which is being held under wraps for the time being, is being written by David Berenbaum (Elf). Since Universal and Hasbro have a six-year deal spawned by last year’s mega-hit Transformers, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing some Hasbro titles popping up in some sort of variation in all of Bay’s work. Expect to see Nicolas Cage kill someone with a Barrel of Monkeys™ within the next year. And in 2010, Shia Lebeouf will write, co-produce and star in the internationally acclaimed drama Giga Pets™.

Those familiar with the game know that Parker Brothers’ Ouija (owned by Hasbro) consists of a board with letters, numbers, the words “yes” and “no”, the sun and moon, and the Parker Bros. logo. You and your friends (unless you’re doing it by yourself, which would be sad) put your fingers on a circular/triangular-ish disc-ish majigger with a see-through center. You ask various spirits in the room various questions and you wait for the spirits to move (or I guess compel your friends to move) said majigger over the options on the board. The result is usually giggles, rarely ghosts.

Well. The Hasbro beast must be fed, I guess, even though Ouija is probably the least adaptable game in history. That is, until we see M. Night Shyamalan’s Skip-It ™.

6 Degrees of . . . Jumanji to Zathura

The title game was played by Kirstun Dunst in Jumanji, who then played around with little-known actor Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire (pictured with molesterator Brad Pitt), who beat Tim Robbins to death with a shovel in War of the Worlds, who let his kids turn his house into a spaceship in Zathura.

Read more articles by Josh Radde