Magic: The Gathering’s Live-Action Movie Just Took a Big Step Forward

The film adaptation of Magic: The Gathering has secured its writers — Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald. On Tuesday, Deadline reported on the deal, though Legendary Entertainment and Hasbro Entertainment both declined to comment. Gardner and Fitzgerald worked with Hasbro before on a Power Rangers movie that never made it to production, as well as an unfinished Aquaman spinoff called The Trench. They also wrote the upcoming sci-fi series Trancers for Prime Video. It’s unclear what direction the live-action Magic: The Gathering movie might take, but they have plenty to choose from between the cards, novels, and tie-ins with other franchises.

Hasbro and Legendary announced plans to bring Magic: The Gathering to the screen back in February, with hopes of expanding it into a shared TV and movie universe. MTG is considered the first trading card game, and by many metrics, the most successful. It is published by Wizards of the Coast, and it has often crossed over with the company’s Dungeons & Dragons, as well as other fantasy franchises. However, over the years it has evolved its own specific tropes that may be more suitable for a screen adaptation.

Players of the game play as magic-users called Planesewalkers facing off against each other in a duel. Their cards represent magical spells they can use each other, as well as creatures and artifacts they can summon to fight on their behalf. Their spell-casting capacity — mana — is limited by the number of Land cards they can use, and the damage they take from their opponent reduces their “life total.”

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For the most part, the narrative elements of this game are minimal for players, outside of the descriptions and flavor text on the cards. However, in recent years, Wizards of the Coast has put a greater emphasis on the worldbuilding and stories behind the game. In 2017, the company hired Nic Kelman as its Head of Story and Entertainment to consolidate all the game’s lore for continuity and consistency, as well as writing the novel War of the Spark: Ravnica. There are many other MTG novels, comics, and short stories within the franchise, but for now we can only guess which, if any, might be the basis for Gardner and Fitzgerald’s movie.

Attempts to bring MTG to the screen have made a lot of headlines in recent years without bearing any fruit — in 2019, the Russo brothers even announced their plans for a TV series at San Diego Comic-Con. That plan was scrapped at some point in late 2023, and now the work has started over with a new creative team at Netflix. So far, there’s no projected release date for either the movie or the series.