We may not be getting the liberal extravaganza of a “New Hamilton-Inspired Lena Dunham Web Series” that The Onion prophesied the DNC would launch in 2016, but we are getting the exact Lena Dunham project 2024 deserves. If you said “crypto,” uh, congratulations? You’re correct!
According to Variety, the Girls creator is in early development with A24 and Apple for a new film based on Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon, best-selling author Michael Lewis’ account of the whole Sam Bankman-Fried fiasco. Dunham is on board to write the script, but no other details about the film’s team are available as of this writing.
If you managed to stay blissfully unaware of this whole scandal in 2022, Bankman-Fried was the founder of FTX, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. That was before the whole thing came crashing down in 2022, when it was discovered that there was a lot less money in the coffers than the company was reporting. Bankman-Fried was subsequently convicted of seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering, and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2024.
An official description of Lewis’ account of the whole thing (via Variety) reads:
When Michael Lewis first met him, Sam Bankman-Fried was the world’s youngest billionaire and crypto’s Gatsby. CEOs, celebrities, and leaders of small countries all vied for his time and cash after he catapulted, practically overnight, onto the Forbes billionaire list. Who was this rumpled guy in cargo shorts and limp white socks, whose eyes twitched across Zoom meetings as he played video games on the side? Lewis sets out to answer this question, taking readers into the mind of Bankman-Fried, whose rise and fall offers an education in high-frequency trading, cryptocurrencies, philanthropy, bankruptcy, and the justice system. Both psychological portrait and financial roller-coaster ride, Going Infinite is Michael Lewis at the top of his game, tracing the mind-bending trajectory of a character who never liked the rules and was allowed to live by his own―until it all came undone.
Dunham’s film isn’t the first project to be announced about the crypto crash even just today. This morning, Squid Game creator Hwang Dong-hyuk revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that season two would also deal with “this huge cryptocurrency craze that led to so many young people getting neck deep in debt and driven into poverty.” Amazon also announced that they were working on an FTX series with the Russo Brothers in 2022 (although that hasn’t come to fruition yet) and Variety reports that “another streamer is currently prepping a limited series of their own with a recent Emmy winner circling the role of Bankman-Fried.” Now, we just have to wait for the crypto show bubble to burst.
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