Oregon Trail movie in the works at Apple with Barbie-like musical numbers

Last Updated on November 1, 2024

If you spent your younger years in the school computer lab constantly dying from snakebite, drowning, a broken leg, cholera, and, everyone’s favourite, dysentery, then you should be pumped (or perhaps horrified) about the new Oregon Trail movie. THR reports that Apple is developing a new movie based on the popular video game with Will Speck and Josh Gordan attached to direct and produce.

Sources say that the Oregon Trail movie will feature several original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie from EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. The project is still in early development, but Speck and Gordon first started working on it over two years ago. “We were talking about what we could cook up next, because we really want to do another musical,” Speck said. “[Pasek & Paul] mentioned [Oregon Trail], and we now have the rights to it, and we’re putting it together alongside them and some other exciting people.”

Gordon added that the darkly comedic aspect of the video game is what drew them to the project. “[Oregon Trail] always had this dark band of humor running through it, because your chances of dying from everything from dysentery to a cut to anything was… Basically, every move you ended up dying,” Gordon said. “For us, that’s returning a little bit to our roots in comedy, marrying it with the fun of doing a big musical, and also just the ambition of taking that very seriously as well and making a big historical westward expansion epic that’s also about dying from dysentery.”

The Oregon Trail video game was first developed in 1971 and found players leading a group of settlers from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Along the way, you could trade for supplies, cross rivers, go hunting, and chances were extremely high that at least one member of your party would die of dysentery. The game has been updated many times over the decades, with the latest incarnation released by Apple three years ago. As the game was “educational,” it was one of the few that students were allowed to play in school. You’d name each occupant of the wagon after your friends, and watch, one by one, as they each sucumbed to horrible deaths. Sure, you could make an effort to actually make it to the end, but where’s the fun in that?