Move over, Beth Harmon.
The next classic game to win over major audiences in the manner of Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” is the colorful 1980s fave, the Rubik’s Cube.
Hyde Park Entertainment Group, helmed by prolific action flick producer Ashok Amritraj, 64, and Endeavor Content have teamed up to produce a feature film based on the three-by-three brain teaser, according to Variety. Priya Amritraj, Amritraj’s daughter and Addison Mehr are signed up to executive produce the movie, which does not yet have a public release date.
The movie follows the success of Netflix’s smash series starring Anya-Taylor Joy as checkmate prodigy Beth Harmon, which set off a surge in online chess games and a run on old-school playing boards.
There’s also a Rubik’s-inspired TV game show in the works: Amritraj will executive produce the series along with Andrew Glassman of Glassman Media, a subsidiary of Endeavor that brought competition shows such as “The Wall” to NBC, and “Spin the Wheel,” hosted by Dax Shepard to Fox.
It’s unclear whether the film will be in the style of “The Lego Movie,” where the toy itself is an anthropomorphic main character, or a feature about the creation and competition around the beloved puzzle, which is solved by aligning colors monochromatically on each of the six sides of the 3-D cube.
The toy has gotten bit parts in a few blockbusters: 2006’s “The Pursuit of Happyness” starring Will Smith and more recently, the animated Oscar winner “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”
But this will be the first time that the puzzle, which was invented by Hungarian sculptor Ernő Rubik in 1974, will be front and center.
A Netflix-hosted mini-documentary from last year, “Speed Cubers” followed the friendship between two solving savants who competed against each other in the 2019 World Cube Association’s World Championships.
The colorful cube brand was licensed to Ideal Toy Corp. in 1980, and has been sold over 350 million times, including to a young Amritraj.
“I’ve had a personal and nostalgic connection to the Rubik’s Cube from my early days in India,” Amritraj said in a statement, adding that he was looking forward to creating a “complex Rubik’s universe.”