It’s looking like the Magic: The Gathering movie is in good hands.
Matt Johnson, the writer and director of BlackBerry, was a recent guest on The Big Picture podcast from The Ringer to discuss his latest film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. At the end of the interview with Sean Fennessey, Johnson is asked about what he is excited about working on next and he responds with the Magic: The Gathering movie and what the game has meant to him.
Johnson said that Magic taught him how to read and his love of the game is quite clear from his response.
“For years I’ve said I’d trade my entire career to be a professional Magic card player, and now I am making the Magic card movie,” Johnson said. “It was like making a wish on a monkey paw. To me, that’s like my Star Wars. Getting to revisit a world that I know so well, that I love so much, that meant so much to me, it’s surreal to be able to do a project like that.”
Not only was Johnson an avid Magic player, he was an aspiring pro player at one point. In the interview, Johnson mentions playing a Pro Tour Day 2 in Detroit in 2006 and getting crushed by legendary Limited player Richard Hoaen, which led to his quitting Magic and pursuing film making more seriously. Such a Pro Tour never happened, but it is likely he was remembering Grand Prix Detroit in 2005, which was a Limited event featuring Champions of Kamigawa and Betrayers of Kamigawa. Though the coverage page for the event shows Johnson didn’t play or draft in a pod with Hoaen, Johnson did finish in 37th place just outside of the money.
After his exit at the tournament in Detroit he gave up on pro Magic, leaning into his now career as a movie maker.
“I made that decision right then that I need to take film making seriously because I am never going to be a pro Magic player,” Johnson said. “I just quit … broke my heart.”
While we now know more about the confirmation of Johnson signing on to direct the upcoming Magic movie, there is very little other information to go on. Jonhson even echoed that by wrapping up his answer on the movie with, “But, it’s still early days, so who knows?”
You can watch or listen to the entire interview on The Ringer of on Spotify, the segment with Johnson starts at 1:18:45 and the answer about the Magic movie comes at 2:05:35.
