Ben Affleck Was About To Make a McDonald’s Monopoly Movie, but Disney Sent It to Jail
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Ben Affleck made the shift from blockbuster star to visionary director. After initially impressing audiences with his acclaimed directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, Affleck established himself as one of the most capable and exciting filmmakers in the business with the releases of The Town in 2010 and the Best Picture-winning Argo in 2012. To date, he has directed five features, four of which have RottenTomatoes scores above 90%. His next project, a Netflix film, has reportedly just begun filming.
As much success as Affleck has seen as a director thus far, there have been some disappointments and projects that failed to see the light of day. One such case is a film that would have told the story of the infamous McDonald’s Monopoly scam. After beating out several other Hollywood power players in a bidding war to acquire the rights to the story, Affleck was set to make the film for 20th Century Fox. In the wake of Disney purchasing Fox’s entertainment business for over $70 billion in 2019, though, the “McScam” film was one of many projects that Disney either outright canceled or halted development on.
Ben Affleck and Matt Damon Paid a Record-setting Price To Acquire the Rights to ‘McScam’
In 2018, an article titled “How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions” was published by The Daily Beast. It told the stranger-than-fiction true story of how more than $24 million was illegally claimed after a former police officer named Jerome Paul Jacobson rigged McDonald’s popular Monopoly game. Shortly after the article hit the internet, it went viral, becoming the #1 trending topic on Twitter within a day. This caused many members of Hollywood to quickly pounce at the opportunity to acquire the rights to the story in order to adapt it into a film.
A massive, star-studded bidding war commenced just a handful of days after the article was published. Warner Bros. wanted to buy the project for Steve Carell to star in. Netflix made a bid to potentially attach Robert Downey Jr. and Todd Phillips. Universal tried to nab the rights and place Kevin Hart in the leading role. Other movie stars-turned-producers who attempted to purchase the film included Mark Wahlberg and Will Ferrell. Martin Scorsese showed interest in purchasing it and casting Leonardo DiCaprio. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment even got in on the bidding. Eventually, when the dust settled, the winners were 20th Century Fox and Affleck and Matt Damon‘s production company, Pearl Street Films. They acquired the rights for a reported $1 million, which was the highest price ever paid for an optioned article in Hollywood history at that time. Affleck was set to direct with Damon to star, and the screenplay was going to be written by Deadpool writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.
Evident by the amount of money being bid to purchase the rights, the “McScam” movie was thought to be a big potential hit. In retrospect, the frenzied bidding war it fueled was an early indicator of where Hollywood was headed. In the early 2020s, we saw an onslaught of sensationalized true stories centered around recognizable brands such as Blackberry, Flamin’ Hot, Tetris, Dumb Money, and Affleck’s own Air. Movies that, at their best, are compelling narratives with resonant themes about the state of our world and, at their worst, feel like hastily-made films adapted from Wikipedia pages.
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It should be noted that in our increasingly crowded entertainment landscape, this new sort of IP boom is not a coincidence. Executives seek these stories out and sometimes go as far as to introduce them to the public years before the film adaptation even gets released. An important piece of information about the “McScam” article and bidding war is that producer David Klawans essentially orchestrated the whole thing. Klawans — an indie movie and TV producer known for his ability to uncover tremendous real-life stories through diligent research, who executive produced Argo — had been developing the “McScam” article with journalist Jeff Maysh, for two years, with the expressed purpose of eventually turning it into a film. It’s a strategy that Klawans developed. He finds obscure true stories, approaches journalists to research them and turns them into long-form articles, and then — after acquiring the life rights of the stories’ subjects — circulates the articles around Hollywood to garner interest from production companies.
Disney Buying Fox Killed Ben Affleck’s ‘McScam’ Movie
It’s fair to say that Affleck’s proposed film had tremendous momentum out of the gate. That all changed in the spring of 2019 when Disney completed their purchase of 20th Century Fox. After the deal was complete, many in-development former Fox films were canceled by Disney. These scrapped projects included Channing Tatum‘s never-realized Gambit movie, a Flash Gordon reboot from Taika Waititi, a sequel to Chronicle, and a Magic: The Gathering movie. Since one of the strongest motivations behind Disney’s studio takeover was bolstering its back catalog for the then-forthcoming Disney+ streaming service, many movies that were being worked on by Fox before the merger weren’t deemed a priority. Even some of the films that did ultimately get a release, like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, quickly became forgotten flops after being unceremoniously dumped into theaters by Disney.
Though the “McScam” film was never officially announced as canceled by Disney, the lack of updates points to the fact that it was put on the backburner and ultimately left in the past. One of the last times Affleck spoke about it publicly, he hinted at the complications caused by the Disney deal by telling Collider in 2020, “We’ve gotten a new draft. That’s really good. Hollywood’s a weird place, because the person who was running the studio when they bought that script, just left that job. And the studio that was going to make it got bought by another studio. So there’s these moments where things sort themselves out, and you sort of see ‘Is this still a priority, or are they really interested in different kinds of movies?’ And I’m not sure whether or not, McScam, what kind of priority it is. We really like it. We’re still developing the script.”
Documentary fans will remember that Hollywood did end up telling the “McScam” story in 2020, with HBO’s hit six-part docu-series McMillion$, which was produced by Mark Wahlberg. As for a narrative film version, though, Affleck’s version seems to have died at Disney. With virtually no news coming about the film in the past five years, and the director and others involved having moved on to other projects, it stands to reason that a revival isn’t imminent. Hollywood is an unpredictable place, though. So, maybe one day they’ll return to this story with a new director and new stars attached. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
