It’s time to ford a river, hunt for food, and (hopefully) not die of dysentery. A film adaptation of the iconic grad school computer game The Oregon Trail is in development at Apple, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Per the new report, the Oregon Trail movie is in the early stages of development and sees Will Speck and Josh Gordon attached to both direct and produce. Additionally, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are to provide original music as well as produce via their Ampersand banner with the film reportedly set to feature some original music numbers. The Lucas Bros. and Max Reisman will write the screenplay. Caroline Fraser produces for HarperCollins Productions along with Kevin K. Vafi — Harper Collins owns the rights to the game’s franchise.
Specific details about the film are not available. The Oregon Trail was originally developed by Don Rawsitch, Bill Heinemann, and Paul Dillenberger in 1971 and was produced by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) in 1974. The educational film was originally intended to teach schoolchildren about pioneer life in the 19th century on the Oregon Trail by having the student play a wagon leader of a party of settlers heading west from Independence, Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon circa 1848. Along the journey in the game, players encounter various decisions and challenges with serious consequences — including broken limbs, lack of food, typhoid, and dysentery. The game rose to cult status in the 1980s and 1990s. There have been multiple iterations of the game over the years with the game currently available to play on PlayStation from Gameloft. The game has also moved beyond the video game realm with an official card game, The Oregon Trail Card Game, released by Pressman Toy Corporation in 2016.
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How Will They Make The Oregon Trail Into a Movie?
With the film being in very early development, there aren’t details on quite what to expect from The Oregon Trail movie. However, the project is described as being an “action-comedy”, which does give some insight on what direction the film could go. While The Oregon Trail video game is about a very serious time in American history, the game is surprisingly (and darkly) funny — the phrase “You have died of dysentery” which comes from the game has become sort of its own pop culture entity, appearing not only in online memes but on things like (unofficial) merch as well. Given the action-comedy angle and special place the game has as nostalgia for many, it’s likely that the film adaptation will be in the vein of the Jumanji franchise, specifically 2017’s Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and 2019’s Jumanji: The Next Level, while those films are technically about a game but are based children’s books Jumanji and Zathura, both written by Chris Van Allsburg. The report about The Oregon Trail’s musical numbers — which are described as being “in the vein of Barbie” also seem to indicate some of the tone of the project.
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The Oregon Trail movie will be just the latest example of Hollywood adapting video games for the big screen. The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a major success for Universal Pictures last year, and there have been numerous other video game-based films released as well, such as Sonic the Hedgehog, and Borderlands just to name a very few.
The Oregon Trail movie does not yet have a release date.