Almost anything can and has been adapted into a movie: video games, true crime stories, comics, Twitter threads, and memes are all old hat when it comes to source material. Even a doll can inspire a cinematic blockbuster. So what could possibly be left? Well, over the last year, Netflix has been committing to a new strategy. Is this the next adaptation frontier, or did the streamer buy a ticket to doom?
According to Deadline, Netflix has optioned the rights to the board game Ticket to Ride, and is developing a movie written by Ben Mekler and Chris Amick. The hit board game has players take charge of their own railways as they plan routes from city to city on various maps. The movie will presumably be about more than that.
Ticket to Ride is a global board game sensation, with versions for various geographic regions.
This is only the latest of several board game acquisitions by Netflix. In April 2025, Netflix acquired the rights to develop Monopoly into a game show. And in October 2025, Netflix announced a competition series based on the whodunit game Clue, as well as multiple scripted and unscripted projects based on Settlers of Catan.
It’s a big bet on an unproven formula. There aren’t many adaptations of board games at all, save for the disastrous 2012 movie Battleship. There are some tangential cases, like Clue’s parody movie, Jumanji being centered around a fictional board game, the upcoming Hungry turning Hungry Hungry Hippos into a horror movie, or the various movies focused on Ouija boards, which were packaged as board games when first released. But there hasn’t been a successful mainstream adaptation — scripted or unscripted — of a classic board game (Clue, while fondly remembered, lost money in 1985).
Is this new trend a byproduct of Squid Game’s success?
With four different gaming irons in the fire, Netflix has a lot riding on this move. However, there is at least a little precedent. One of Netflix’s biggest hits was Squid Game, a scripted series that showed contestants playing deadly playground games. It was soon followed by Squid Game: The Challenge, an unscripted series with a similar concept, but with different games (like Battleship) and lower stakes (no murder). If scripted and unscripted series around playground games can bring in streaming audiences, maybe adaptations of classic board games can do the same thing.
There are still no specific details about these adaptations; perhaps the Catan series will be an epic medieval prestige drama about the perils of starting a new settlement, and the Ticket to Ride movie will be about petty infighting during the construction of a transcontinental railroad. Until we know more, Netflix’s vision of the future seems decidedly strange.
