Universal dusts off Ouija, slashes budget by 95% and loses McG

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Dust off the OUIJA board folks, the shite will be played at a theater near you in the not so distant future…

Back in November, we told you FRIGHT NIGHT scribe Marti Noxon had been hired by Platinum Dunes to rework a OUIJA draft. At the time, the film was not only shut-down, but passed on by Universal for escalating budgets ($100 million) and creative differences with director McG. But in the last few months, the studio has seemingly found a model they deem worthy of employing with the film. With the recent success of low-budget found-footage flicks like CHRONICLE and PROJECT X, word is Universal will invest a mere $5 million in OUIJA…a model most genre flicks are increasingly adhering to these days. As you might guess, McG is likely out.

Based on the classic Hasbro board game about conjuring up spirits of the dead, OUIJA is described as a four-quadrant supernatural adventure centering around a family, with influences from The Mummy and Indiana Jones.

I must say, if there has to be another film based on a goddamn board-game, a low-budget OUIJA is probably the only one I could get behind. For awhile, it looked like the film was dead as Dillinger, which would have been more than fine as well. Still, the stripped down version is the only one likely to work, wouldn’t you say? How the hell do you even make a $100 million OUIJA movie? Crazy.

PROJECT X star Kirby Bliss Blanton