WeWork, the commercial real estate company that creates shared workspaces for tech startups, has been in the news a lot lately, and none of it good. Well, their situation is about to get worse because a movie is being made about the embattled company. Even worse, it’s from the guy who wrote The Big Short and Bombshell, so the WeWork scandal is about to go seriously mainstream.
The film is being developed by Blumhouse’s Jason Blum, with Oscar winner Charles Randolph writing the script based on reporting by Fast Company journalist Katrina Brooker, who is also writing a book on the subject. According to THR, the book (and likely the film) will center on the rise and fall of WeWork and its co-founder Adam Neumann, the latter recently forced to resign (with a sweet $46M per year “consultant” gig, however) over his mismanagement of the company as well as a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment and other inappropriate workplace behavior. The intertwining lives and ambitions of Neumann and Masayoshi Son, the Softbank CEO who became one of WeWork’s prime investors, will also be explored.
This would’ve been more interesting to me if Blum were developing one of his trademark horrors with WeWork at the heart of it, but maybe that’s sorta what he and Randolph will come up with? The Big Short and Bombshell are both horrors in their own way, right? What’s for sure is this will almost certainly be a prestige film that arrives in the heat of awards season whenever it’s ready to drop.
