Former Netflix film chairman Scott Stuber is betting on a Kalshi and Polymarket movie.
Page Six Hollywood has exclusively learned that Stuber’s production company has landed the rights to journalist Zoë Bernard’s forthcoming book, “The Gamble: Inside the Race to Dominate Prediction Markets—and Own the Future,” that follows the billion-dollar companies Kalshi and Polymarket.
Stuber will produce the film and has set writer Tze Chun (“I’m a Virgo,” “Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai”) to adapt Bernard’s upcoming book, which sold in April to publishing house Little, Brown and Company.
Bernard’s book proposal — seen by Page Six Hollywood — pitches the non-fiction tome as “The Social Network” meets “The Big Short.”
Says the proposal: “This is a story of three founders, one market, no rules — and not one of the founders has celebrated their 30th birthdays. They are brilliant, ruthless, and obsessed with winning.”
The pitch adds: “Shayne Coplan, the founder of Polymarket, and Tarek Mansour and Luana Lara Lopes, the founders of Kalshi, are racing to define what prediction, and power, can be. All three are now billionaires on paper.”
The proposal also says: “Prediction markets are scaling at a velocity that outstrips even early social media, with the potential to become a trillion-dollar market in less than a decade. All this despite the fact that, until very recently, these markets were illegal in the United States. In less than a year, they’ve vaulted from college dorm rooms and sports bars to CNN chyron crawls and billboards in Times Square.”
Earlier this year, Bernard penned a Vanity Fair profile on the companies. The author also made noise with another February piece for Wired, titled, “Inside the Gay Tech Mafia.”
The “Gamble” book proposal says that: “The story will weave deep and varied reporting into a single narrative, plunging readers inside the worlds of these founders and their companies and reveal the high-stakes, high-strangeness ecosystem of prediction markets. It will introduce a cast of vividly original characters—college dropouts, mathematicians, and professional poker players — who are making millions forecasting the future. And it will pull back the curtain on what Coplan, Mansour, and Lara Lopes have so far attempted to hide from the public eye: a rivalry that is as cutthroat as it is childish.”
Stuber won the bidding war for the book’s rights over a number of other top producers. Sources said that “Spider-Man” franchise whiz Amy Pascal and “Project hail Mary” gurus Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were also interested, as was Range Media Partners, we hear.
It’s also worth noting that the sale of the movie rights to Bernard’s book comes in the wake of Amazon MGM’s recent decision to drop director Luca Guadagnino‘s nearly finished Sam Altman movie, “Artificial.” Neon acquired the film this week, but Amazon’s decision to drop it seemingly sent a message to the industry that stories, especially negative ones, about influential tech titans could cause headaches for studios as they become more entrenched with Silicon Valley.
Sony’s “The Social Network” sequel, “The Social Reckoning,” from Aaron Sorkin, comes out in October.
UTA, which repped Bernard, and Stuber have yet to comment.
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