Lionsgate and Hasbro are teaming up to turn Monopoly into a feature film. It might sound like train-wreck waiting to happen - but The Truman Show scriptwriter, Andrew Niccol is working on the script.

The idea was originally bounced around in 2008 when Ridley Scott was in talks to direct a film where an obsessive Monopoly fan's world starts warping into the board-game - but that project was shelved.

This is how the press release sets up the new plot:

"A boy from Baltic Avenue [a square on the US Monopoly board] uses both Chance and Community in a quest to make his fortune, taking him on a fun, adventure-filled journey."

It adds that the film is "about making your own luck, what makes you truly rich and, of course, avoiding jail-time" - you could probably put the same blurb on the back of Martin Scorsese's Wolf of Wall St.

Hasbro has a track record of collaborations with Lionsgate, they worked together on Transformers, Battleship and Quija.

The box office performance and critical receptions received by these films has been mixed.

2012's Battleship has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 34 percent - while Quija has an aggregated score of only 7 percent.

"It's just like the board game, assuming the board game cost $200m and was dumb" read a Concrete Playground review of Battleship.

The game was invented over a century ago, the game has been translated into almost 50 languages - over 275m copies have been sold worldwide.