Forget comic books or video games, the untapped future of IP mining is clearly in board games. And now that Netflix has gotten into a Euro strategy game like Catan, it’s a gateway drug to the streamer next making movies and shows based on Ticket to Ride, 7 Wonders, Everdell, Azul, and Scythe, just you wait.
Netflix announced Tuesday that it is acquiring the screen adaptation rights to Catan, the wildly popular board game franchise created by Klaus Teuber and originally released in 1995 as The Settlers of Catan. The streamer bought — or traded, likely a haul of some brick and wood or a bunch of wheat — the rights to make movies, TV series, and unscripted series all based on the board game.
Part of the reason we immediately thought of Netflix for Catan compared to anyone else is that Netflix has its gaming division that we so often forget about. While it’s not necessarily the reason anyone signs up for Netflix, the fact that Netflix has some free mobile apps tied to “Squid Game” or “Love Is Blind” or “Stranger Things” arguably keeps a few people around. So adding a Catan app, letting people actually play the game online with other Netflix users while they’re Netflix and chilling with the show or movie, makes perfect sense in our mind.
But as IndieWire understands it, Tuesday’s deal doesn’t also include gaming rights. So at the moment, it doesn’t mean Netflix can put out its own Catan gaming app. That already exists for mobile in an official form, but it hasn’t been supported or updated of late in the way that digital versions of some other popular games have. It likely also doesn’t mean we’ll get a “Wednesday” themed version of Catan or something like that. Maybe you can play the game in person at the Netflix House.
That doesn’t exclude Netflix from one day licensing the app and offering it to users that way. Netflix does have a number of big name mobile apps and games it doesn’t own itself, like “Civilization VI” or “Hades,” to name just a couple. But not having some sort of playable Catan experience whenever a movie or series does come out could be a big missed opportunity, especially one that Netflix itself would be uniquely capable of executing.
Because we’re still admittedly skeptical what a Catan movie would actually look like. Sure there’s a fictional island of settlers and knights and robbers, with trading and road building and cities and other scenarios you can possibly imagine as a backstory, but it’s ultimately a game with some hexagon tiles, a whole lot of dice rolling, and friends and families turning on each other when you need to discard half of your cards or watch as your Longest Road bonus gets stolen from you.
Darren Kyman from game developer asmodee, Pete Fenlon from CATAN Studio (an asmodee studio), and brothers Guido Teuber and Benjamin Teuber from the Teuber family are all attached to produce, as is Roy Lee (“Weapons”) from Vertigo Entertainment.
Catan isn’t the only board game Netflix is looking to bring to the screen. It also has an “Exploding Kittens” project (also an asmodee game) and is developing a reality competition series based on Monopoly.