Three years ago, when Universal adapted Hasbro’s Battleship to the screen, critics understandably turned their nose up at the concept of transforming a board game into a fully-fledged feature film — and rightly so, given Peter Berg’s underwhelming end product. But does one bad apple really spoil the bunch? That’s the question Lionsgate will now ask of We’re the Millers director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who has signed on to helm the studio’s big-screen adaptation of strategy board game, Dust.
News first broke via The Hollywood Reporter, with Thurber revealing his excitement for the idiosyncratic project.
“It’s a cool spin on a genre that I’ve loved for a long time and it opens up narrative avenues that are just thrilling,” said Thurber. “It’s all my nine year-old fantasies wrapped in one thing, a World War Two mash-up.”
Essentially, Dust is a tabletop strategy game and, later, was turned into a graphic novel from Paolo Parente that tells the revisionist story of World War II. Rather than the Allies achieving victory in 1945, Dust imagines a reality where the battle continued to rage despite Hitler’s assassination during Operation Valkyrie. As time passes, the combat engineers three waring factions: the Allies, comprised of the United Staes, the Commonwealth and the French Colonies; the SSU, essentially a combination of the USSR and China; and what is left of the Axis.
Rooted deeply in the genre of science fiction, Dust also features towering robots that were engineered following the discovery of a new type of ore. At the time of writing, Lionsgate is shopping around to find the right screenwriters, but we understand that the project has secured The LEGO Movie‘s Dan Lin, who is on board as producer.
We’ll learn much more about Dust over the coming months as the studio gets the wheels in motion, but in the meantime, share your early impressions using the comments section below.
