Film producer Gail Katz has purchased the film and TV rights for Settlers of Catan.
Easily one of the best known tabletop games in existence, The Settlers of Catan was originally released in Germany in 1995. Since then it’s enthralled countless players, been translated into dozens of languages and been adapted into a variety of forms including a two-player card game, a novelization and a variety of video game ports. Now, however, the series could be poised to enter an entirely new frontier: films.
That, at least, is if producer Gail Katz has her way.
Best known for her work on movies like Air Force One and The Perfect Storm, Katz recently acquired the film and television rights to Settlers of Catan. While no actual project has been announced as a result of the acquisition, Katz affirmed in a statement that she’s eager to explore the possibilities presented by the “timeless world” of Catan. “I’ve been wanting to see an adaptation of the game for years, ever since my Catan-obsessed college-aged kids introduced me to it,” she said. “The island of Catan is a vivid, visual, exciting and timeless world with classic themes and moral challenges that resonate today. There is a tremendous opportunity to take what people love about the game and its mythology as a starting point for the narrative.”
The big question, of course, is what a film or TV show based on the game would actually be about. While, as Katz said, the world of Catan is certainly a “vivid” and fleshed out one, the game itself doesn’t really have much of a central storyline. That being the case, one has to wonder if that couldn’t wind up being an advantage for the project that eventually emerges from this. As countless video game movies have already demonstrated, Hollywood is kind of terrible at adapting game stories into film. Given a blank slate like Catan however, it would be more than possible for Katz and company to just come up with their own story and paste it into the world already established by the game. That’s what the novel did and, by many accounts, it didn’t turn out half bad.
Source: The Verge
