First Movie Adaptation Of Popular 33-Year-Old Card Game Gets Encouraging Update As Director Addresses Lore Challenges
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The first Magic: The Gathering movie has received a new development update from director Matt Johnson, more than three decades after the massively popular trading card game first launched.
Created by Richard Garfield in 1993, Magic: The Gathering became the world's first trading card game and has since attracted more than 50 million players. Despite that popularity, its expansive collection of characters, worlds, and storylines has never resulted in a feature film until now. Meanwhile, a separate animated Magic: The Gathering series has also been in development at Netflix.
Legendary Entertainment and Hasbro Entertainment's planned live-action Magic: The Gathering universe is expected to begin with a feature film before expanding into television and other projects. The plans were first announced in February 2025, with BlackBerry filmmaker Matt Johnson later boarding the movie and Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald being tapped to write the screenplay.
Now, Johnson has offered one of the most tangible updates yet on how the long-awaited adaptation is progressing. Speaking with GQ, the filmmaker revealed that work on Magic: The Gathering is "going amazing," while sharing his personal connection to the game and confirming that artists from the franchise are currently storyboarding the movie. Read his comments below:
It’s going amazing. It is, in true Bourdain fashion, a kind of unbelievable miracle that I specifically would get to do that at this stage in my career, because my own personal story is that I was desperate to become a professional Magic card player. That’s all I wanted.
And I gave it up because I was like, “I’m just not good enough. I will never be able to do this.” So to be handed something like this is an act of irony that I’m so grateful for. How’s it going? Going great. The Magic: The Gathering artists are currently drawing storyboards for the movie, and it’s some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen.
The fact that storyboards are now being created is an encouraging sign of tangible progress after years of attempts to bring Magic: The Gathering to the screen. However, Johnson also recognizes that his familiarity with the property doesn't necessarily make adapting it straightforward.
The director explained that while Magic has extensive lore and a devoted fanbase, the franchise is so expansive that fans can have very different ideas of what its world represents. With enough lore to support a much larger fantasy universe, deciding what should define the first movie presents a unique challenge. Johnson even suggested that this could be one reason it has taken more than three decades for a movie to materialize:
Even though there is a lore and there is a world that people are very, very dedicated to—and I’m one of those people—it is so unbelievably expansive that I don’t think you are going to find one person who has a unified “This is what the Magic world is to me.” In fact, I think it’s one of the reasons why it’s been 30 years and they haven’t made a movie.
That observation highlights what may be the movie's greatest challenge. Magic: The Gathering's lack of a feature adaptation isn't due to a shortage of material. Instead, decades of worldbuilding mean Johnson and the creative team must determine which parts of the franchise can represent Magic for longtime players while remaining accessible to audiences unfamiliar with the game.
Johnson may be uniquely positioned to strike that balance. He described himself as having an "expert level of appreciation and obsession" with the period he played most heavily, from roughly 1996 through 2007 or 2008, while approaching other parts of the franchise as a relative newcomer.
There is currently no confirmed release date, cast, or story for Magic: The Gathering. Still, the involvement of the game's artists in creating storyboards indicates that the ambitious adaptation is moving forward. After 33 years without a feature film, the latest progress raises an even bigger question: which part of Magic's enormous world Johnson will choose to bring to the screen first.