Best known for comedies like Dodgeball and We're The Millers, writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber is taking a rather different direction for a future project. He's developing a movie based on the board game and graphic novel **Dust{
Not to be confused with the god simulator From Dust, this Dust is based on the tabletop strategy game by Paolo Parente. Parente went solo to create the game after working on Magic: The Gathering and Mutant Chronicles, and spun it into enough of a cult success that it now has its own convention in Arizona.
Players work their way through scenarios in a steampunk 1940s where World War II is still raging and the world has been divided into three blocs. Based around a cards-and-dice system, the aim is to rack up 'victory points' for taking control of power sources, factories, land and populations. The winner is the first person to score a given value of victory while holding a capital city.
Thurber has long been a fan, finding his way to the game after stumbling across its accompanying comic. "It’s a cool spin on a genre that I’ve loved for a long time," he says, "and it opens up narrative avenues that are just thrilling. It’s all my nine-year-old fantasies wrapped in one thing, a World War II mash-up."
Thurber and Lin are now looking for a writer, so Dust is some way off yet. Thurber's immediate next film is the action-comedy **Central Intelligence, starring Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. Shooting starts on that in the summer.