Adam McKay already made movies about the financial collapse, Dick Cheney, and a pair of truly twisted step brothers (not to mention a TV show about an evil rich family, an adaptation of a popular movie about the crushing weight of capitalism, and a climate change show), so it only makes sense that his next project would be about another au courant thing that’s killing us. According to Deadline, he’s working with HBO to develop an adaptation of The First Shot, an upcoming non-fiction narrative book from Brendan Borrell about the ongoing search for a COVID-19 vaccine. So, just to make this all clear: McKay is producing a TV show based on a book about a vaccine that we don’t have yet, making this the coronavirus version of HBO moving forward with Game Of Thrones before the books were done—but hopefully this works out better than that did. We’re not saying the coronavirus cure can’t involve Dr. Fauci destroying King’s Landing with a dragon, but we are saying it probably won’t.
That’s about all we know for this project, which makes sense, since we don’t have the coronavirus vaccine yet. We don’t know when it will be made, we don’t know how it will be distributed, we don’t know which pharmaceutical company is going to make billions of dollars gouging us, and we don’t know what’s going to happen when Trump dramatically mishandles the whole thing. Actually, we probably know what’s going to happen there, because it’s going to involve someone named John Barron “accidentally” sending the country’s whole supply to a secret golden bunker under Mar-a-Lago… at which point Dr. Fauci will ride in on his dragon! Holy shit, Adam McKay better be taking notes here, because this just got much more exciting.