Netflix is making a movie about capitalist hero Martin Shkreli and the Wu-Tang Clan
It looks like the bad guy from The Old Guard is getting a spin-off, with Collider reporting that Brittany Runs A Marathon’s Paul Downs Colaizzo is going to direct a movie about evil pharmaceutical industry creep Martin Shkreli and the time he bought that one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album—so no, it’s not actually related to The Old Guard, but that guy was supposed to be a Shkreli-type and not a standard Zuckerberg-type, right? Anyway, How To Make It In America’s Ian Edelman wrote the script, with the movie reportedly being titled Once Upon A Time In Shaolin (the name of the album), and Wu-Tang’s RZA is apparently planning to produce along with Brad Pitt’s Plan B.
It’ll be interesting to see how this works, though, since there’s isn’t much of a story here that doesn’t involve a rich guy throwing his money around. Wu-Tang recorded the album in secret, pressed one single copy, then sold it to a guy for somewhere around $2 million. That guy turned out to be Martin Shkreli, who then become famous for raising the price of a drug called Daraprim that treats infections and deadly parasites from $13.50 a tablet to $750, prompting Wu-Tang to say that it would be donating “a significant portion” of his slimy, slimy money to charity. Later, when Shkreli got in trouble with the law for the one and only thing rich white people are not allowed to do (fraud), he tried to sell the album. RZA apparently tried to buy it but couldn’t because of the complex rules surrounding Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, but Shkreli didn’t end up selling it anyway. Last we heard, a judge tried to make Shkreli give it up as part of the assets he had to forfeit from his fraud conviction.
So maybe there is more story here and the movie will get into it? Otherwise it’s just going to be RZA reading news stories about Shkreli being a greedy jerk and then feeling bad about taking his money. There’s not much of a movie there… unless we find out that Shkreli has been hunting down a group of immortal soldiers in hopes of farming them for organs and sucking out whatever magic lets them live forever?