'Avengers' Writers Team With 'Halloween' Director For Data Privacy Scandal Movie
Avengers: Endgame directors Anthony and Joe Russo have used their power in Hollywood to form their own production studio called AGBO, and several of the brothers' upcoming projects are reunions with fellow veterans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One of their newest is an untitled film which will reunite them with Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.
The movie is set to focus on Christopher Wylie, who was at the center of the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal; that company illegally mined unsuspecting Facebook users' data without permission and used it for political targeting. David Gordon Green, who most recently directed 2018's Halloween film, is in talks to direct. Learn more about the new movie below.
Deadline reports that David Gordon Green (who, like the Russos, got his start in the indie world) is in talks to direct this untitled movie which has a finished script from Markus and McFeely, and he's looking at this as his follow-up to the Halloween sequel he's making for Blumhouse. AGBO, which is aiming to make the type of edgy films most studios probably wouldn't, plans to finance the movie and find a distributor for it later.
It's been easy for headlines to slip through the cracks over the past three years as we've been drowning in a hellscape of news about our current administration. But the Cambridge Analytica scandal was big enough to break through all the noise, causing Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to testify in front of Congress. Here's the gist: a consulting firm illegally harvested millions of Facebook users' personal data and used it to create micro-targeted political advertising that arguably swayed the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. This new film will be about Christopher Wylie, the now-30-year-old man who apparently harvested the data initially but who ultimately blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica and turned over a trove of documents to the press revealing how the company used that personal information for political gain.
That's unquestionably a dramatic story – but is it something audiences actually want to see? Personally, I know that I've spent so much time being buried in political news over the past few years that the last thing I want to see is any of those events dramatized in a movie or TV show. I admit that there may be some larger value in telling this story this way and making sure as many people as possible are aware of it, but I'm just kind of exhausted thinking about sitting in a theater and watching this story play out again. But maybe that's just me – and if they lock down a great cast, I could easily get pulled right back in.
Header logo Used By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61183151