IP Picks 🔎: Crypto Bros, and Lots of Murder
➕ the CIA disguise master with a cause
Welcome to The Optionist! As always, thanks for reading. I’ve been thinking about Jennifer Lawrence dropping out of an adaptation of Bad Blood because she thought Amanda Seyfried did such a great job portraying Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu’s Dropout. (I wrote about it in Tuesday’s newsletter if you want to check it out.)
I’ve been trying to think of comparable high-profile books like this where the adaptation got so publicly scuttled. (One of the first things I wrote about here was the long tale of why The Secret History never happened.) I’m curious: What’s the great white whale of adaptations that stands out to you? What’s a page-to-screen project that never happened that you’ve wondered about? Send me your suggestions and I’ll look into them for a “whatever happened to…” piece down the line.
Now this week's picks. The FTX meltdown is one of the biggest stories in the news right now, and we’re following it closely at The Optionist to suggest the best way to approach it in an upcoming Friday newsletter. But in the meantime, we have a great feel-good crypto story — I know, who’d have thought there was a feel-good crypto story? — about crypto bros buying an English soccer club. It’s definitely got a Welcome to Wrexham/Ted Lasso vibe to it.
I was struck by Sean McNulty’s recent analysis in The Wakeup about what he calls Netflix’s #pivottocrime as a window into how murder and crime shows dominate — he figures 70 percent of CBS’s primetime schedule is devoted to solving crimes. But as one agent said to me recently, their best sales have come from crime pitches with either a twist, a mashup or a unique setting. Among the other great IP finds this week we have some ideas for fresh takes on the genre, including:
A cool novel about murder and mayhem set in the world of Victorian-era spiritualists
A fun mashup of Emily in Paris and murder
A psychological thriller about the psychiatrist who evaluated Nazi leaders at Nuremberg