Who could fail to enjoy the developing stories of the Brexit movie? If you missed this one in the New Year haze, it concerns “very serious Hollywood people” being interested in making a movie of The Bad Boys of Brexit, a book of the campaign penned by Leave.EU financier Arron Banks. As far as casting is concerned, Banks declares that he sees Matt Damon playing him, while Farage laments the fact that Ollie Reed’s death rules him out of the running to give us his Nigel.
According to Banks’s comms chap, Andy Wigmore: “We have three interested parties in the rights to the book, and we will be meeting representatives from three studios, including a Netflix representative, on Jan 19 in Washington, DC. We have invited all of them to our pre-inaugural drinks party … We have also invited many of Trump’s team to the event.”
The one thing any major Hollywood studio executive needs to know about said bad boys is that they are absolutely not out-of-towners. “Effectively, that book is like a screenplay,” judges Wigmore, “so half the work’s been done for them.” I like how Andy’s putting the academy on notice there: don’t you dare shunt this into Best Adapted – it’s Best Original and we will pull our participation at the Kodak theatre if you dick us around.
Lost in Showbiz will be checking in with the status of the project at every possible stage of its journey to development hell, and as soon as I know more, so will you.
