‘Game of Thrones’ Cogman Writing ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Movie
The runaway success of HBO’s Game of Thrones means more opportunities for the faces behind the scenes as well as the actors hoping to live another episode. Producer, writer, and story editor Bryan Corgman is the latest to be tapped with the chance to help write the script for a movie based on the popular collectible trading card game, Magic: The Gathering.
Deadline is reporting that 20th Century Fox hired Game of Thrones’ Corgman to rewrite the original screenplay draft originally submitted by current producer Magic: The Gathering producer Simon Kinberg.
The job should be right up Cogman’s alley as he’s served as the story editor on all four seasons of Game of Thrones with numerous writing credits. This includes the gasp-inducing episodes The Rains of Castamere from season three and The Mountain and the Viper from season four. It should be interesting to see what kind of shocking turn of events can be produced from what is typically a very competitive but less War of the Roses fantasy card game.
Magic: The Gathering was originally published by Wizard of the Coast in 1993 and is played by two or more players using a deck of cards. Each games depicts a battle between wizards called Planeswalkers with the cards representing spells, items and creatures used to attack and defend. The trading card game exploded in popularity during the 90s and still has millions of players around the world. Noted for its complex rules and difficulty, the trading cards have spawned video game versions for the iPad, PC, Xbox, and Playstation, as well as competing products such as Hearthstone: Heroes of WarCraft from Blizzard, and Scrolls from Minecraft developer Mojang.
In a somewhat ironic twist, it’s also become popular to take characters and events from Game of Thrones to create mock trading cards for Magic. The pair you see above are but two of a set produced by TeamPwnicorn. Similar cards were also produced for Hearthstone by members of the Reddit forums.
There is currently no release date for the Magic: The Gathering movie, but its still early in development. Fox only acquired the rights to produce the film from Hasbro this January.
Meanwhile, Cogman is just the latest Game of Thrones member to be attached to a movie. Director Alan Taylor picked up little gigs directing Thor: The Dark World, and the upcoming Terminator reboot. Of course, there’s the many Game of Thrones actors discovering more opportunities as well from Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister) to Kit Harrington (Jon Snow) to Emilia Clarke (Danerys Targaryen). They just need to keep their heads.
