Hasbro's new plan to monetize its most famous board games is by turning them into reality shows. On October 7, Deadline revealed that Netflix plans to turn murder mystery classic Clue into an unscripted competition series. The news comes less than a month after the streaming service announced its plans to produce a Monopoly game show.
Netflix's Clue will task players with solving a string of mysteries. They'll need to complete physical and mental challenges to collect clues, and then they'll have to correctly guess the murder suspect, weapon, and location to avoid elimination. Every correct guess increases the series' overall prize money.
While the contestants perform ludicrous tasks for our pleasure, the usual stars of the classic board game will apparently be swanning around, too. Deadline names Colonel Mustard, Miss Scarlett, Professor Plum, and Mrs White as confirmed cast members. We expect they won't be half as witty as Tim Curry and his pals from the 1985 flick, and we know they won't be as sexy as the board game characters themselves. Seriously, the latest edition of Clue was a surprising smokeshow.
Competition shows like this seem to be having a serious moment in the sun right now. Netflix certainly produces them in droves, from Squid Game: The Challenge to Love Is Blind. Based on the pitch, we're assuming the Clue series will try to chase the success of The Traitors, a game show that, to anyone who's played the best board games of late, feels like a rip-off of Werewolf and Blood on the Clocktower.
The new show will be produced by Hasbro Entertainment, B17 Entertainment, and Sony's unglamorously named The Intellectual Property Corporation (IPC). There's currently no news about a release date.
What kind of challenges would you like to see in a Clue series? Tell us your ideas in the Wargamer Discord. Or, for more on tabletop games, here are the new board games you should definitely check out.