The beloved board game Clue is being brought to life as a new TV series on Peacock. The series will be brought to life by writer/executive producer Dana Fox (Wicked: For Good) and director/executive producer Nicholas Stoller (The Muppets), though no other names are attached to the project. This marks the next chapter in the life of the game, with Netflix confirming back in October that it was developing a competition series inspired by the game.
Deadline confirmed the news of the upcoming project, where they detailed of the series:
Inspired by the beloved game, Clue brings a modern twist to the colorful cast of iconic characters. When a group of strangers are invited to an eccentric billionaire’s murder mystery night to solve the famous questions — who, where and with what — they quickly discover that nothing is what it seems to be, and the stakes are even higher than life or death.
While we live in a day and age where it feels like no toy or game is safe from being adapted into a movie or TV series, if only to cash in on name recognition, the 1985 Clue movie is considered by many to be the best imaginable translation of the source material into a narrative. That film saw a group of guests arrive at a dinner party in a mansion, not knowing why they were invited or who brought them there, only for the bodies to start piling up.
To effectively replicate the nature of the board game, which can feature a variety of solutions, three different endings were filmed and different theaters screened different finales during its initial theatrical run. Clue‘s home video release included all three endings, while broadcasts of the movie similarly compiled all three endings. Clue stars Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, and Martin Mull.
The Perfect Time for More ‘Clue’
A new take on Clue seems long overdue, but not for lack of trying. In 2018, Ryan Reynolds secured the rights to Clue, hoping to develop a movie he would star in. Progress on that iteration was relatively slow, with a few different filmmakers attempting to find the right angle for the project and even enlisting Jason Bateman to star, only for that project to fizzle.
Murder mysteries are a tried-and-true genre that fans have been interested in for decades, but there’s been more interest in the formula in recent years. In 2017, Kenneth Branagh adapted Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, which earned $353 million worldwide, resulting in two more Christie adaptations from Branagh. In 2018, Rian Johnson unleashed the whodunnit Knives Out, a project whose popularity also inspired two sequels, with Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery in theaters now. Johnson also developed the mystery series Poker Face for Peacock, which was just canceled after Season 2.
Hulu’s murder mystery Only Murders in the Building just wrapped up its Season 5, with each season seeing characters played by Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez investigating a death in their apartment building, while Apple TV had their own murder mystery in The Afterparty.
Clue
- Release Date
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December 13, 1985
- Runtime
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94 minutes
- Director
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Jonathan Lynn