Reports have emerged that Netflix’s Gamestop movie may be at a more advanced stage of development than the also-planned MGM film.
Just yesterday we reported that MGM had moved quickly to secure the film adaptation rights for The Antisocial Network. It promises to tell the story of how a group of Reddit users managed to throw Wall Street’s established stock investors into a state of panic, to the point where one trading app (whose name was in a lot of headlines last week) caused a huge controversy by suspending trading on certain stocks. In particular, the stocks of the US video game store GameStop.
Netflix, it seems, has been even quicker on the draw and already too has a project based on the same events in active development. Deadline reports that Oscar-winning scribe Mark Boal, who penned The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty,is working on the script, whilst Noah Centineo has been attached to star. Centineo has starred in To All The Boys I’ve Ever Loved and is also cast to play Atom Smasher opposite The Rock in Black Adam, and He-Man in the long-mooted Masters Of The Universe movie.
How this ends up affecting MGM’s planned adaptation remains to be seen, especially given the news that a TV series charting the events of the GameStop shares scandal has also been announced. MGM may have the prestige source material in the form of Ben Mezrich’s planned The Antisocial Network (Mezrich’s book about Facebook provided the platform for David Fincher’s 2010 adaptation The Social Network), but with so many projects being planned, there’s a danger that getting to the market last means it might miss the moment of cultural impact.
Of course, that’s if both projects even make it to fruition: the general principle in Hollywood is when two competing films focusing on the same subject matter are in development, the one that makes it into production first is the only one that ever gets completed. Remember Baz Luhrmann’s Alexander the Great film starring Leonardo DiCaprio? Of course you don’t, because Oliver Stone got there first with his own version, not to mention the many ‘lost’ Robin Hood films that have fallen by the wayside every time a new adaptation grinds into production.
Where this story goes next is certainly interesting, especially as the events upon which the projects are based continue to unfold in real time. We’ll keep you posted as we hear of further developments.
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