Maya Hawke Is the First Name in the Live-Action "Magic: The Gathering" Movie — and the Director Calls Magic "My Star Wars"

If you have never touched a Magic card, here's all the setup you need: the game launched in 1993, it invented the trading card game, and the entire hobby — the deck-building, the tournaments, the cards that cost more than cars — descends from it. Thirty-three years later it's getting the full movie-universe treatment from Legendary Entertainment and Hasbro, and the project now has its first cast member.

Maya Hawke is cast first — and her role is still secret

Maya Hawke — Robin in Stranger Things, the voice of Anxiety in Inside Out 2 — has been cast in what both The A.V. Club and Polygon describe as a key role in a planned ensemble. Deadline reported the casting first, on Wednesday. Her character hasn't been revealed, and fair warning: no release date, no production start and no plot details have been announced by anyone. Anyone telling you more than that today is guessing, and you can treat it as such.

What the reports do say is that Hawke was the priority get — the A.V. Club's account has producers reportedly keen to bring her on board first, before the rest of the ensemble is built around her.

The director grew up playing the game

Matt Johnson — BlackBerry — directs and co-writes with Noah Gardner and Aidan Fitzgerald. His qualification for the job, beyond the filmography, is this, from an appearance on The Big Picture podcast earlier this year, as printed by Polygon: his childhood dream "was to be a professional Magic card player." And: "To me, [Magic is] 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."

That's the right energy for this material. The last decade of game adaptations has run on exactly this fuel — people who grew up inside the thing, making the thing.

The studio part, briefly

Legendary and Hasbro announced the live-action film and television universe back in February 2025. Legendary's Mary Parent, at that announcement, as printed by The A.V. Club: "We pride ourselves on being thoughtful caretakers of singular, beloved IP, and no property better fits that description than Magic: The Gathering. Alongside the fantastic Hasbro team, we look forward to creating a multimedia universe that thrills longstanding fans and creates a broad wave of new ones."

There's also a separate animated Magic series in production at Netflix, run by Terry Matalas — a different project from Johnson's film, and worth not confusing the two. Polygon, citing Vulture's reporting, adds that Johnson's film is inheriting parts of the Dune production apparatus and that Legendary is reportedly planning a trilogy; that part is reported as reporting, and it's labelled that way here.

Hawke's next screen role, one line only because this desk covers that franchise elsewhere: she plays Wiress in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, out November 20. The Magic movie's next real news will be the rest of the cast. When it lands, it lands here.