Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
In news that’s going to force us to develop a whole new set of punny touchstones for joke headlines (“Legendary taps director to helm another Magic movie,” “Magic movie ‘lands’ big star,” “Something something Black Lotus remember to write a third joke here,” etc.), Hasbro is apparently teaming up with Legendary Entertainment to make movies out of long-running, ridiculously successful competitive card game Magic: The Gathering. News of the films, per THR, comes just a few months after Hasbro made noises about stepping back from putting up its own money for adaptations of its brands in the wake of middling returns for Dungeons And Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Transformers One. But apparently the lure of all those die-hard Magic players out there has both companies dreaming of “cinematic universe” success like it’s 2015 all over again. (Will no one heed the cautionary portents of the Dark Universe? It feels like no one is heeding the cautionary portents of the Dark Universe.)
Oddly, this proposed film franchise isn’t the only Magic media project in the works right now: Netflix has been purportedly working on an animated series based on the game since 2019, and announced in 2024 that the slumbering project was moving into active development under the aegis of Star Trek: Picard‘s Terry Matalas. It’s not clear how that project will interact with these Legendary movies, which a company exec called “a multimedia universe that thrills longstanding fans and creates a broad wave of new ones.”
Published by Wizards Of The Coast, Magic has been running for more than 30 years now, building its basic premise—two wizards try to murder each other using spells and creatures represented by what can frequently be insanely expensive pieces of cardstock—out into a wide universe of novels, games, and attendant lore. If we had to guess, Hasbro is presumably hoping to use the films, and the show, to build up a nerd-positive feedback loop like the one surrounding Netflix’s League Of Legends adaptation Arcane, with the shows and films feeding players into the game, and vice versa. We’ll maintain a certain degree of skepticism, though: The 2023 D&D movie seemed to prove that, even if you make a genuinely fun film based off of an incredible powerful “nerd” brand and then launch it into an environment that’s never been more receptive to geek-friendly properties, it can still slump hard at the box office, destroying what could have been much larger franchise plans. Fingers crossed that this one doesn’t turn out to be another mulligan.
