Elizabeth Holmes 'Bad Blood' Movie Starring Jennifer Lawrence And Directed By Adam McKay Still In Development
In 2016, it was announced that Adam McKay would direct Bad Blood, a movie about con artist and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, with Jennifer Lawrence set to play Holmes. Since then, though, we haven't heard much more, and McKay and Lawrence went off to do another movie – Don't Look Up. Meanwhile, there's currently a Hulu limited series about Holmes in the works – The Dropout, which will star Amanda Seyfried. So what of Bad Blood? According to McKay, the film is still in development.
In 2003, Elizabeth Holmes – then only 19-years-old – founded Theranos, a health technology. The company rose to fame – and wealth – after claiming to have invented a device that could perform advanced blood testing with just a tiny fingerprick. There was one big problem: none of it was real, and soon everything came crashing down. The Holmes story has been chronicled in multiple forms, including the excellent John Carreyrou book Bad Blood, which has the following synopsis:
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.
In 2016, before the book was published, Legendary scooped up the movie rights, with plans for Adam McKay to direct and Jennifer Lawrence to star. So what's the status of that project? According to McKay, it's still in development. Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Coming Soon), McKay said:
"In the case of Jen Lawrence, I've known Jen for a while...One of the first meetings she ever did in Los Angeles was after her first movie was with me, and ... I think she was 17, she might've been 18. She worshipped Step Brothers, so when her agent said, 'Who do you want to meet with?' I'm sure they weren't so happy to hear her answer: 'The guy who did Step Brothers.' So I've known Jen for a long time and have always been dying to work with her...We have been developing the Bad Blood [film]... That is still in development."
In the meantime, though, McKay and Lawrence went off to make the upcoming Netflix movie Don't Look Up. It's unclear if the pair will reunite for Bad Blood soon, but for now, the film is still in the works. However, it's going to have some competition. Hulu has their own Holmes project – the limited series The Dropout, which will star Amanda Seyfried.