The Mark Gordon Company just picked up rights to Molly Bloom’s memoir Molly’s Game, for The Social Network scribe Aaron Sorkin to adapt. Gordon, who is working with Sorkin on the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic Jobs, will produce.
Bloom is certainly a captivating figure to build a film around. From an early age, she was a world-class skier and ranked No. 3 in North America in moguls by the time she was 21. Academically, she was incredibly gifted, achieving a 3.9 GPA in college while studying political science. After just missing out on the chance to become a part of the Olympic team for skiing, Bloom took a year off from school but, utilizing her entrepreneurial gifts, ended up running a lucrative poker ring.
Over the course of eight years, she made millions controlling what would become the world’s most exclusive high-stakes poker game. It was only once Bloom drew attention of the FBI, who showed up on her doorstep armed with automatic weapons, that her empire came crumbling down.
Sorkin previously amazed by telling the story of an ambitious but flawed entrepeneur in The Social Network, which should make him the perfect screenwriter to bring Molly’s Game to the big screen.
The project may be on hold for a little while, though – the final season of Sorkin’s HBO drama The Newsroom just kicked off, and the scribe is currently in the middle of adapting Andrew Young’s The Politician (about the rise and fall of John Edwards, who was at one point a possible presidential candidate) and Michael Lewis’ Flashboys (about a small group of Wall Street men who worked to reform the U.S. stock market by taking away some of the massive advantages that big Wall Street banks possessed).
As always, Sorkin is highly in demand, but an adaptation as tantalizing as Molly’s Game surely won’t sit on the shelf for too long. We’ll keep you posted as the project heats up.
