Given how much the current financial crisis is on everyone’s minds, it’s natural that it would filter into popular entertainment, and has been slowly leaking through movies and TV shows for a while now. HBO Films has decided to tackle it head on, however, knocking together a killer ensemble cast headed by James Woods and Paul Giamatti for banking trouble pic **Too Big to Fail.
Curtis Hanson is directing the film, which will follows some of the power brokers and financial bigwigs (particularly those in the US) who guided the world’s economy around the time of the 2008 collapse. William Hurt is already on board as US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, while Woods will play Dick Fuld, the man who was chairman and CEO of the doomed banking giant Lehman Brothers, who earned the nickname of the “Gorilla” among his Wall Street peers and saw his company come tumbling down like King Kong from the Empire State. Giamatti, meanwhile, will be Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.
So who else is on the list? Deep breath: Ed Asner, Kathy Baker, Cynthia Nixon, Ayad Akhtar, Topher Grace, Dan Hedaya, Michael O’Keefe, Tony Shalhoub and Joey Slotnick.
The film is using New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin (no relation to the Social Network’s scribe, in case you wondered), who wrote the original book, to consult with scriptwriter Peter Gould. It’ll start shooting in the next week or so.