For a while now HBO has been formulating a way to make a movie about the 2008 financial meltdown, but they’ve been stymied because they were depending on the manuscript of a book by Times writer Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair writer Bethanny McLean, which the pair hasn’t even turned in to publishers yet. So according to Deadline New York, HBO turned to Nocera’s Times colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin and bought the rights to his book, which he conveniently finished far more quickly. Sorkin, who has got to be eyeing another, less grind-intensive career now that his book made him that much more flush and famous, won’t be writing the film, however — it’ll be pieced together from his book and other source materials by Peter Gould, who wrote the 1994 action movie Double Dragon. If you recall, that was an explosion-filled movie based on the Nintendo video game, starring Alyssa Milano and Scott Wolf battling mutants and a ninja army in a post-apocalyptic American city. Which, if you think about it, is pretty good prep work for making a movie version of Too Big to Fail. But it would have been even better prep to make a movie out of our version of Sorkin’s book.
HBO’s Financial Collapse Chronicle Getting Timesman’s Too Big To Fail [Deadline NY]
Related: Andrew Ross Sorkin: The Information Broker [NYM]
