By Blumhouse and Mattel Films have teamed up to make an official movie based off the toy company’s Magic 8-Ball property. Now, I know your biggest worry would be that the production company would have gone ahead and done some dumb off-brand Mystic Pool-Ball or something. Fear not, folks, this will be the real deal.
This makes perfect sense as Blumhouse makes the cheapest horror movies money can buy and then gives them a wide enough release to essentially guarantee its success. Sure, they’ll ride on the critical success of Get Out, but even lambasted failures like Truth or Dare still make big returns on tiny budgets. A Mattel Magic 8-Ball costs under ten bucks, so Blumhouse is all in.
A Magic 8-Ball horror movie is an objectively weird and probably dumb idea, though. The toy doesn’t have the same supernatural spookatude as the Ouija Board, and it doesn’t have nearly the same staying power. You shake a Magic 8-Ball a few times, and you’re done. That’s it. No one’s ever spent more than ten minutes with a Magic 8-Ball–
And lived to tell the tale!
Nah, I’m kidding. Everyone lived, but no one bothered to tell the tale.
Since I haven’t thought about Magic 8-Balls in about twenty years, and I’m a very studious journalist, I decided to head down to the local Walmart and buy an official Mattel brand Magic 8-Ball. Just to get a look at its divine future-telling powers, I decided to give that bad boy a shake and ask it what this Blumhouse movie would look like.
Little did I know that Magic 8-Ball technology has greatly improved, and the thing just spit out the entire script! What’s below are excerpts from that script, and if they turn out to be true, then I guess we all know that Magic 8-Balls do have a greater power than we’ve ever known and we should in fact live in constant fear of their pitch black might!
Magic H8-Ball
Tagline: You’ll Be Shaking… With TERROR!
The film opens with teenage Brittany Mills coming across a yard sale. She’s bored and checks it out.
Brittany shows all her friends the ball like it’s an ancient artifact, and they ask it about boys while giggling but quickly get bored, because they have the entire internet in the palms of their hands, and the ball rolls under Brittany’s bed to be forgotten. That is, until her dad walks past her room. The door creaks open, and the ball tumbles out and hits his foot, which sends him quickly into an inconsolable fit of grief and impotent rage.
Brittany opens another pack of gum, shoves the whole thing in her mouth, and sits down to listen to his story–a story about an old Magic-8-Ball-obsessed nerd he couldn’t stand and the tragedy he accidentally caused.
Brittany and her dad agree that Dweeby McFarts sounded like a giant pansy and probably deserved what he got, anyway, but that can’t stop the chaos that’s about to strike the town as McFarts wreaks havoc on the children of those who had done him so wrong when he was little more than a child himself.
Soon, the town’s in a panic. The police investigate the old factory but are crushed by a huge rolling Indiana Jones-style boulder of an 8-Ball. No one can stop the threat, but the villainous Dweeby McFarts saved the best for last–Brittany herself! He sneaks into her house at night to exact his final horrific vengeance.
And there you have it–a suitably dark ending to such a twisted tale as this. I would have published the entire screenplay, but it’s over three hundred pages. Hopefully they’ll chop it down once shooting starts. Either way, this is looking more likely to happen than that doomed Gambit sex comedy, and we’ll keep you updated as more details about this Magic 8-Ball movie emerge from its mystic depths.
