Courtesy of HBO
Hollywood Throws an Escobar Mitzvah
Having apparently exhausted the supply of video games, SNL sketches, and television commercials good enough to make films into, Hollywood is now taking its inspiration from biopics about real-life people made by fictional television characters. The New York Times reports today that Colombian coke trafficker Pablo Escobar is the subject of three prospective upcoming films, any of which would probably tank at the box office and get booed at Cannes, exactly like Medellin, the similarly themed nonexistent movie starring Adrian Grenier’s character on Entourage.
Oliver Stone will compete with Smokin’ Aces director Joe Carnahan and Resident Evil: Apocalypse’s Alexander Witt to be the first filmmaker to bring Escobar’s story to the screen, and we hope he wins (and not just because he’s up against the guys who made Smokin’ Aces and Resident Evil: Apocalypse). Stone has hard-won experience with having the exact same idea for biopics at the exact same time as other people — in 2004 he famously muscled out Baz Luhrman, who’d also planned on making an Alexander the Great movie, so he could cast Colin Farrell in Alexander and pull a J.K. Rowling by making the ancient Greek military commander gay (historians were not pleased, since there’s not yet any conclusive evidence that Alexander was, in fact, homosexual). So Stone has Vulture’s vote — there’s little doubt that his film will be the most historically inaccurate and therefore, probably, the most entertaining.