Netflix is making a movie about capitalist hero Martin Shkreli and the Wu-Tang Clan
Aux Features Film
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?
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I enjoyed “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” but mostly for the script and Jillian Bell’s performance, so this sounds like it could go either way. It’s promising subject matter, for sure.I guess time will tell if it turns out to be, in fact, something to fuck with.
What we don’t know is the only way RZA could get the album back is if he bested Shkreli in a battle. Unfortunately Shkreli learned that Daraprim could enhance a man’s Kung Fu to epic levels. Combine that with the secrets he learned by listening to “Once Upon on Time in Shaolin” and he became unstoppable.
“It looks like the bad guy from The Old Guard is getting a spin-off”You mean Dudley Dursely from Harry Potter?
Stop giving him attention, please, that’s what he wants. No movies, even if they cast him in a bad light.I can see him in prison right now, watching a little flickering CRT, and observing how easy it is to lure millions of devoted right-wing followers by inventing conspiracy theories and playing the victim, and the wheels turning in his head….
We r blessed in our, this the plague year of our lort, 2020! I like RZA clarifying the moment, but i still have to ask him why he felt it necessary to make a $2 mil album no one could hear in the first. He says fans got the paradigm reversed, and were spending more on headphones than Wu music. Ok, that happens tho. When the Wu were all kids, did they buy ALL the music they heard? No, neither did I. He was talking about what some call ‘symbolic capital’ which violates Adam Smith’s value theory of labor. If he was worried fans weren’t viewing Wu work as art any longer, why make an exclusive and inherently elitist statement? The great thing about music is it’s not a Van Gogh…It’s more accessible. How many people on this chat board have actually seen a Van Gogh in person? Few. How many know the lyrics to C.R.E.A.M.? All. The ubiquity of music also necessitates it’s access, or in other words a song shouldn’t be $2 million, because, it’s for the people…and the children.
the story of the album is fairly interesting in that it’s sort of a scam. the individual members’ verses were recorded under somewhat dubious circumstances (they apparently were told it was for some other album
by artist cilvaringz) and then assembled by rza and him, packaged as a proper ‘wu tang album’ and sold at a now-defunct online auction house.with rza producing i highly doubt any of that will be in the movie.
What if this is some convoluted way to be able to get the album to the masses since RZA couldnt buy it back? Like if they put all the tracks in the movie and then released a soundtrack to go with it?
Will the film end with Shkreli being murdered?If so, can life imitate art? Please.