Deadline is reporting Jason Bateman will direct and star in IPO MAN for Fox Searchlight. The film will follow the true story of Mike Merrill, who sold himself as stock and let the shareholders control his life, and is based on the Joshua Davis Wired magazine article "Meet The Man Who Sold His Fate To Investors At $1 A Share." Bateman will direct IPO MAN from a script by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster.
Here's a summary from the Wired article:
On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life.
Jason Bateman is currently working on his THE FAMILY FANG adaptation, and there's no word on when he might start filming for IPO MAN. I love Bateman's BAD WORDS, and I'm hoping the tone of his new movie will be just as dark as his first film as a director.
Jason Bateman can be seen next in HORRIBLE BOSSES 2 on November 26, 2014.
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