Seth Rogen shares Ridley Scott’s pitch for ‘Monopoly’ movie
Seth Rogen has shared that he once watched Gladiator’s Ridley Scott pitch himself as the director for a prospective Monopoly movie based on the famous board game.
Rogen was walking the red carpet at a screening and Q&A event for The Studio, his new AppleTV+ Hollywood satire in which he plays the hapless head of a faltering movie studio. He was asked to describe the most memorable pitch he and writing partner Evan Goldberg had ever heard while working in Tinseltown, and he admitted that he remembered Scott’s vision for the board game adaptation “verbatim.”
“It was a meeting with Ridley Scott,” Rogen told Variety. “He was going to direct the Monopoly movie, and me and Evan went into his office, and he said, ‘Imagine a helicopter shot of Central Park. You’re looking down on it from above. You pull up, you see all the buildings surrounding Central Park. What does it look like?’ And then he said, ‘A Monopoly board!’ And we’re like, ‘Fuck, that’s good.'”
In truth, a Monopoly movie has been in development since 2011, which is when Scott became attached to it. This obviously never came to pass, and a new version was nearly greenlit in 2015 before Kevin Hart and director Tim Story signed on in 2019.
Once again, though, it languished in development hell, with the latest update on the project being the hiring of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves writers John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein in 2025.
While Rogen had fond memories of that meeting with Scott, he revealed he’d heard many other pitches that didn’t go over quite as well in the room. In fact, these pitches inspired The Studio’s running gag of a Kool-Aid movie directed by Martin Scorsese.
“I think there was a Hungry Hungry Hippos movie in development for a while,” he chuckled. “Kool-Aid is not far off from what is actually floating around the halls of this place by any stretch of the imagination. I think we’ve been pitched every brand. I feel like there was a Doritos movie at some point.”
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