Brad Pitt continues to indulge his bromance with hotshot financial journalist Michael Lewis. The actor has already agreed to star in a big-screen adaptation of Lewis’s 2003 best seller, Moneyball, at Columbia Pictures. Now Vulture has learned that Pitt, who is producing an adaptation of The Big Short, Lewis’s explication of America’s 2008 financial meltdown, is moving quickly to get his most recent best seller made: Insiders tell Vulture that Paramount and Pitt’s company, Plan B, are imminently hiring screenwriter Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) for a cool three-quarters of a million dollars to adapt the Lewis book.
Iraq War movies have tanked, which would indicate that moviegoers have little interest in paying to see their country’s current shitstorms reenacted on the big screen. And yet Hollywood seems to think that economic Armageddon will prove more alluring than war. In addition to The Big Short, Fox’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps arrives in theaters on September 24, while Summit Entertainment is developing Rigged with star Kevin Spacey, based on author Ben Mezrich’s nonfiction account, Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, From Wall Street to Dubai.
