Perhaps you’ve heard of Freakonomics, the bestselling book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and thought it sounded interesting, but never found out, on account of how you’re too lazy to read. Well, good news: now you never have to, because it’s being made into a movie.
At first glance, the idea of a Freakonomics movie might sound as nutty as, say, a Monopoly movie; the book is, after all, about using statistics to prove or disprove a number of theories. Here, let’s have Variety explain:
“Freakonomics” has sold more than 3 million copies by using economic theories to analyze issues ranging from whether Adam Vinatieri could realistically be called football’s most clutch field goal kicker to more serious claims that teachers and sumo wrestlers cheat, that swimming pools are more dangerous to children than guns and that the drop in crime can be attributed to Roe v. Wade.
Not the most obvious choice for a film adaptation, in other words — but producers Chad Troutwine and Seth Gordon have lined up a list of highly regarded documentarians, including Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), to film 15-minute segments covering chapters from the book. Filming is scheduled to begin in January and end by summer. As Troutwine tells Variety:
“I stalked the authors for a year because I saw cinematic appeal to the book as soon as I read it…It showed that conventional wisdom should always be tested and never trusted, and that is what documentaries are all about.”
