Kevin Hart has signed up to play the lead role in a film based on the Monopoly board game, it has emerged.

According to Deadline, Hart has joined the long-gestating project along with Tim Story, who directed him in Ride Along and Night School. Hart is also credited as one of the producers. Other than the suggestion it will be live-action, no other details are known.

Hart’s commercial strength was reinforced on this week by the impressive opening figures for his new film, The Upside, in which he plays an ex-con hired by Bryan Cranston’s wealthy paraplegic. Despite largely mediocre reviews, it opened at No 1 at the US box office with takings of $24.9m, suggesting that Hart’s audience appeal has not been dented by the controversy over his history of homophobic comments on social media, which led to him quitting his role as Oscar host for this year’s ceremony.

Toymaker Hasbro, which owns the Monopoly brand as well as Transformers, has been attempting to get a movie off the ground for at least 10 years. One previous project saw Ridley Scott on board as a producer, while another, in 2015, commissioned a script from Gattaca’s Andrew Niccol that “centred on a boy from the game’s modest Baltic Avenue [a square in the US version of Monopoly] on a quest to make a fortune”.