Magic: The Gathering movie greenlit from Dune and Dark Knight studio Legendary

Legendary Entertainment and Hasbro Entertainment announced in a joint news release on Thursday that they have reached a deal licensing Magic: The Gathering to Legendary for development into “a live-action feature film and television universe,” starting with an initial planned movie, then expanding to other media. Legendary is the studio behind IP-derived movies like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part Two, and a recent run of Godzilla and King Kong movies, including Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.

There were no initial details about what area of Magic the studio might want to explore, or who would be involved with the production. The initial news release just promised “a multimedia universe that thrills longstanding fans and creates a broad wave of new ones.” But looking at Legendary’s other output — Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Inception, the 2016 Warcraft movie, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel and Watchmen, and a lot more — at least suggests the specific dark, somber tone and blockbuster scope that the company might bring to the material.

The news release notes that Hasbro has also licensed Magic: The Gathering to Netflix for the previously reported (and recently revived) upcoming animated TV series, which suggests this new deal hasn’t cancelled or overwritten the old one. Presumably, Legendary’s planned Magic universe won’t intersect with Netflix’s version at all.

The deal is part of a current Hasbro push to get its properties into the entertainment world. As the news release notes, “Hasbro Entertainment recently announced deals with Sony’s TriStar Pictures and Sony Pictures Television to re-imagine Clue across film and television, a deal with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap and Lionsgate to produce a film based on Monopoly, and a deal with The CW to produce game shows based on Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble, which premiered this past fall.”