Fox Searchlight has acquired Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share, an article by Joshua Davis (Wired Magazine). Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses 2) will star in and direct the cinematic version, titled IPO Man. Bateman will play a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill, who decided to sell himself on the open market on January 26, 2008.
Merrill divided himself into 100,000 shares, and set an initial public offering price of $1 per share. Each share earned a potential return on profits that he made outside of his day job as Customer Service Representative at a small Portland software company. Over the next 10 days, twelve of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1% of “himself” but promised that his shares would be nonvoting. He assured his new stockholders that they would decide what he should do with his life.
The whole procedure generated a multitude of complications for the actual person, Merrill, when shareholders called for control over his life decisions, such as whether to have a vasectomy and even whether or not he should move in with his longtime girlfriend, who also just so happened to be a minority shareholder as well.
Bateman will be working from a script by Micah Fitzerman-Blue & Noah Harpster, writers from the acclaimed transgender series Transparent on Amazon, and Bateman and Jim Garavente (Jasmine) will be producing through their company, Aggregate Films, with Joshua Davis, who has a deal at Fox Searchlight.
IPO Man will make Bateman’s third directing gig, following 2013’s Bad Words and the upcoming, The Family Fang starring Nicole Kidman (Grace of Monaco). Next, he will be seen reprising his role of Nick Hendricks, as part of the boss-killing trio in Horrible Bosses 2, which is scheduled to hit theatres on November 26, 2014.
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