IP Picks🔎: Love Is in the Air (Well, Sort of)
➕ A trio of romantic tales grapple with second chances, killer crushes and love during wartime
Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along.
The amount of conversation swirling around the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has been really interesting. Especially, the public’s fascination with murder suspect, Luigi Mangione — his privileged background (elite prep school, Ivy League university), his manifesto-friendly politics, even his good looks. The chatter on social media has been virtually non-stop and the takes have been all over the map. One actress was nearly canceled after she called him “a star” and Penn professor (Mangione’s alma mater) got into even more hot water for seeming to celebrate the murder. Everyone from Senator Elizabeth Warren to comedian Bill Burr has weighed in on what it all means.
The killing has already launched dozens of fanfic stories, opinions on whether it should be a movie and even casting suggestions for who should play Mangione. Beyond the broad outlines reported so far, we don't have enough information to figure out if there's a movie here … yet. I'll be watching to see what develops over the next few months and will flag the best IP for you as soon as they’re published.
In the meantime, there are a couple of useful takeaways here — neither of which are very surprising. First, people really, really hate the healthcare system in the U.S. and are hungry for symbols of that unhappiness. We've skirted around this before with the Oxy dramas Dopesick and Painkiller. It’s also been touched on in shows like Breaking Bad. But there's still a lot of room for other takes. I think a movie or TV show that captures this simmering (and now deadly) anger could find a substantial audience.
Second — and I think this is related — people are hungry for anti-establishment folk heroes. Most of the comps I'm thinking of go back to the previous century — Billy Jack, First Blood, Pump Up the Volume — with Netflix's Rebel Ridge being a more recent example. Audiences appear hungry for lone-wolf antiheroes taking on the man. In other words, a main character who’s as pissed off as they are, but not so partisan that it splits the audience in half. Narratively, the key is capturing the white-hot rage many people feel toward a system that seems stacked against the little man.
There was an interesting op-ed in the NYT recently about the decline of "literary men" and its consequences. The basic premise is that reading has become a female pursuit — the NYT Best Sellers list has gone from 50-50 male/female to three-quarters female. Meanwhile, roughly 80 percent of MFA students in creative writing programs are women. I went on the Unedited podcast this week to talk about it. (This episode, the second of two parts, isn’t up yet but the first half is.)
I'm less interested in the broader political implications the author wants to draw from the data — I'm skeptical of the link he wants to make to the recent presidential election — than what this means for the book-to-film pipeline. If book buyers skew overly female, what does that mean for the kind of stories that are likely to get optioned? What kind of stories are being neglected? What does it mean for Hollywood if we lose men as readers?
It strikes me that this is where Hollywood and the publishing industry diverge. For all the attention that we pay to bestseller lists, they have limited utility as barometers for what gets optioned and made. Hollywood tends to look far beyond bestseller lists for books to adapt, especially when it comes to genre titles.
Vulture has a running list of all the book adaptations that showed up on a screen this year (including returning series). There’s 119 titles on the list and by my quick count it’s about evenly divided between male and female authors. Beyond that, I'm still trying to figure out what this means. I'm curious to hear what you think.
The full lineup:
A true-crime drama about two corrupt detectives working for the mob
A romantic drama about a second chance at love for a divorced couple
A dramedy about four half-siblings who have just discovered each other road-tripping to confront the father who abandoned them
A murder-mystery/romantic thriller about a woman trying to prove that her secret crush didn’t kill his girlfriend
A historical-fiction romance about love across battle lines during the Civil War
