Sony Pictures to Make FLASH BOYS - The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street
Sony Pictures and producer Scott Rudin are currently in the process of acquiring the rights to a book set on Wall Street called Flash Boys. The book was written by Michael Lewis, and it's the complete opposite of what Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street was. Flash Boys is based on a true story, and the players in it are the kind of people that would absolutely hate what Jordan Belfort was doing in Scorsese's film. In fact, that's the kind of people that they were fighting against.
The story follows "a group of Wall Street guys who grew frustrated by a loophole that gave traders the opportunity to game the stock market. They banded together to reform the financial markets by creating an exchange that rendered impotent the act of high-frequency trading, a growing form of trading that gave insiders an advantage." These guys walked away from high paying jobs to fight against the liars and the cheaters.
After seeing a movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, it would be really interesting to see the other side and watch this group of crusaders out on a mission to expose Wall Street for what it is. This will make a great film, and knowing the kind of producer Rudin is, he'll bring together a team of very talented individuals to bring it to life.
Here's a more detailed description of the story from the book:
Flash Boys is about a small group of Wall Street guys who figure out that the U.S. stock market has been rigged for the benefit of insiders and that, post–financial crisis, the markets have become not more free but less, and more controlled by the big Wall Street banks. Working at different firms, they come to this realization separately; but after they discover one another, the flash boys band together and set out to reform the financial markets. This they do by creating an exchange in which high-frequency trading—source of the most intractable problems—will have no advantage whatsoever.
The characters in Flash Boys are fabulous, each completely different from what you think of when you think “Wall Street guy.” Several have walked away from jobs in the financial sector that paid them millions of dollars a year. From their new vantage point they investigate the big banks, the world’s stock exchanges, and high-frequency trading firms as they have never been investigated, and expose the many strange new ways that Wall Street generates profits.
The light that Lewis shines into the darkest corners of the financial world may not be good for your blood pressure, because if you have any contact with the market, even a retirement account, this story is happening to you. But in the end, Flash Boys is an uplifting read. Here are people who have somehow preserved a moral sense in an environment where you don’t get paid for that; they have perceived an institutionalized injustice and are willing to go to war to fix it.
Via: Deadline