If you’re wondering why Fox is suddenly keen on doing a big-budget, franchise-starting movie based on a game where players “fight” each other with playing cards, then you needn’t look any further than Warner Bros.’ “Warcraft” movie. The properties are very similar, in that it involves heavy participation from its audience.

This is just another case of monkey see, monkey do, and in Hollywood, the monkeys wear business suits.

And so you have Fox assigning their new go-to franchise guy Simon Kinberg to produce and “oversee” (your guess is as good as mine what this actually means) a movie based on Wizards of the Coast’s card game “Magic: The Gathering.” The idea, of course, is to “develop the property with an eye to launch a massive franchise on the scale of Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings.”

Ambitious!

Kinberg is also the same guy currently trying to make a coherent movie universe out of Fox’s “Fantastic Four” and “X-Men” properties, basically aping what Marvel has been doing with their superheroes. Join the club, Fox. Warner Bros. says you should get in line.

“Magic: The Gathering” was first introduced in 1993, and back in the day you couldn’t go into a comic book shop without seeing people, usually adults, playing them at tables. I remember seeing tournament announcements and all kinds of wacky stuff. You don’t see a lot of “Magic: The Gathering” stuff going on these days, but then again, I also haven’t been to a comic book shop in years, so who knows, maybe they’re still there, shuffling those mighty decks…