IP Picks🔎: 'Ocean's Eleven' for the Kiddies
âž• Armored-car thieves, a feel-good sitcom and a period cops vs. radicals procedural
Welcome to The Optionist. As always, thanks for reading along. I love the mix this week, so we're gonna get right to today's picks after a couple of quick tidbits.
Here’s a big deal that caught my attention: The chess scandal involving world champion Magnus Carlsen and grandmaster Hans Niemann was big news a couple of years ago. In fact, we featured it right here in The Optionist when it first broke. It was one of those stories where you knew within 30 seconds that it could be a movie. There wasn't a turnkey, optionable take on all of the sordid allegations. Though, as I noted back then, the report from chess.com was an excellent starting point, and there was enough available information to develop something with a little elbow grease.
Now Ben Mezrich's got a book about it (or at least a book proposal) titled Checkmate, and the bidding has been intense. CAA offered different packages to various streamers — one version had Ron Howard attached, another had David Heyman and a third had Taron Egerton. Ultimately, A24 partnered with Nathan Fielder as director and Emma Stone's Fruit Tree as producers and won out with a seven-figure offer before the book deal was even finalized.
Mezrich is a shrewd popularizer with a good eye for stories with movie potential. He's had three books made into films — 21, The Social Network and Dumb Money — and has a fourth currently filming (Seven Wonders, a novel). By my count, Mezrich also has another five that have been optioned. In other words, he's a known brand. The proposal promises to give a broader context to chessgate, or as THR put it, "The story is not only about the rivalry and the scandal, but the macro backdrop is the rise of a billion-dollar chess industry and so-called ‘collision of tradition and innovation’ in the game." It will be interesting to see what Mezrich brings to the table beyond what's already known — and also how quickly he’s able to finish his book.
Given how much has already been written about this, there's still a chance someone could pull a Dropout to Mezrich's Bad Blood. But mostly, I'm happy about the enthusiasm for any book and also to see someone back up that enthusiasm with real money. It just underscores that no matter the state of the market or the changes in technology, books remain the most useful underlying IP.
Tidbit #2: I was having a drink with an executive who has a long-gestating book finally coming to the small screen later this year. (I'm not trying to be overly coy, I just didn't mention that I might write about this, so I'll avoid naming them). We were talking about the patience required to get something to the screen. They bought the rights ahead of publication, couldn't get it done as a movie, but saw opportunities in TV as the market evolved. I was thinking about that conversation again today as the first reviews for the adaptation of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full dropped. Talk about patience! That novel was a big hit . . . in 1998. But changing times have made the story of a real-estate mogul whose life crumbles feel more relevant, and it got David E. Kelley interested enough to write the six-episode Netflix series. I don't know the full backstory of what happened with the rights between then and now, but I'd love to read a piece that walked us through all of it. If someone's already done that, I haven't seen it.
Onto this week’s picks, which offer something for almost everyone — from a fun kids adventure to a sitcom. The full lineup:
A true-life historical procedural about the NYPD’s hunt for violent political radicals in the early 1900s
A feel-good sitcom about a group of misfits banding together to save a community center
A kids-adventure spin on The Italian Job and Ocean’s Eleven
A psychological drama about a thirtysomething woman who faked being a high school student
A true-crime thriller in the vein of The Town about a gang of armored-car thieves