Few directors have managed to rebrand their careers as successfully as Adam McKay has in the last six months or so. Prior to last year’s awards season, McKay was known as a comedy guy whose absurd comedies starring Will Ferrell are among the best broad comic movies of his generation. He had a little political angle sometimes, something to say, but the jokes were always the things driving it.
But that changed with last year’s “The Big Short.” McKay’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ book was funny, sure, but it was funny like an Aaron Sorkin script was funny: in the service of something larger — in this case, a detailed and scathing examination of how shorting the housing market helped to cause the financial crisis. It got rave reviews, proved a hit, won McKay an Oscar, and made him a serious proposition in Hollywood.
And now he’s being handsomely paid for his follow-up, as Deadline reveal that Legendary Pictures have won a fierce bidding war for McKay’s latest pic, which will star A-lister Jennifer Lawrence. As announced a few weeks ago, “Bad Blood,” which will be written and directed by McKay based on an upcoming book from writer John Carreyrou, tells the story of Elizabeth Holmes (Lawrence), the founder of company Theranos, which promised to revolutionize blood testing, but has tanked in value over time as it increasingly appears that the technology is too good to be true.
Basically every big studio and upstart financier was bidding for the project, including Paramount, Fox, Warner Bros, STX, The Weinstein Company and Amazon, but it’s the now Chinese-owned Legendary, who have a distribution deal with Universal, that won out. It’s an interesting point, because the studio have overwhelmingly favored tentpole genre fare to date, but this is a $50 million-budgeted drama — it’s an indication that new production chief Mary Parent (“The Revenant”) is shifting things somewhat.
There’s no timeline on the movie yet — McKay still has to write the script, and Lawrence has Darren Aronofsky’s new movie (apparently titled “Mother”) and Francis Lawrence’s “Red Sparrow” to film this fall at least, so we wouldn’t expect to see this until the fall of 2018 at the earliest. And then hopefully we can get McKay to turn his eye to the financial collapse currently unfolding thanks to Brexit…