If the champagne-spewing, cocaine-snorting excesses of “The Wolf of Wall Street” left a bad taste in your mouth, don’t worry: the next Big Banking drama to come out of Hollywood is going to be a nice, populist palate-cleanser.
Per a report from Deadline, the non-fiction bestseller “Flash Boys” will be adapted for film. The project marks a second collaboration between author Michael Lewis and producer Scott Rudin; the pair worked together previously to bring “Moneyball,” another finance-oriented drama based on Lewis’s work, to the big screen.
Where “The Wolf of Wall Street” gazed in adoring awe at Jordan Belfort’s haute-couture criminality, “Flash Boys” centers on a group of traders who would’ve liked to see Belfort in jail.
In a real-life drama that led to the founding of the IEX stock exchange, the men who became known as Flash Boys were Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers who became disgusted with what they saw as a rigged system designed exclusively to help the rich get richer.
Rather than play the game, they walked — taking with them the skills and experience to build their own better, fairer, more accessible exchange.
Much like “Moneyball,” “Flash Boys” promises to be an exciting story in which a few wily outsiders flip the bird to some very powerful people. And with an ensemble of real-life heroes to cast, the producers will need to be picky about who they bring on board.
The most notable characters to be cast are the trio of men who set things in motion, first investigating trading practices and ultimately founding IEX.
First, there’s Ronan Ryan, who’s described as pale, cautious, and lacking the swagger of a typical Wall Street trader: in other words, if Michael Cera had it in mind to play a stockbroker, he’d be a pretty great pick.
And for Rob Park, the gifted technologist whose “Aha!” moment broke the game open for the Flash Boys, we’d go for Steven Yeun — assuming he’d like to stop decapitating zombies and hang out in an office for a few months.
The biggest role, though, will be that of Brad Katsuyama — the Canadian trader who was the driving force behind the creation of IEX. It’ll be a plum starring role for an actor of Japanese descent, and as far as we’re concerned, a not-to-be-missed opportunity to see Asano Tadanobu doing something a little more realistic but no less heroic than defending Asgard against evildoers.
Who would you like to see in “Flash Boys?”
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