this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Wonder what job offers awaits this guy once he’s free next year
Job offers?! HA.
You’re thinking too small. This has a fucking Adam McKay / Social Network Fincher movie adaptation written all over it.
If Zhong has not already been contacted by a hundred different ghost writers or publishers offering to write a book + movie / mini-series adaptation of his story, I’d be surprised.
This shit is just a more modern Catch Me If You Can / Wolf of Wall Street type situation - but with an arguably more sympathetic character - who gave his friends 10s of thousands of dollars to go on shopping sprees.
The amount of money he’ll make just from the royalties paid out for an adaptation of this would be enough to at least make back some significant portion of the money he stole.
Same as that piece of shit still doing speaking engagements from The Wolf of Wall Street.
People eat that shit up.
I still want to see a badass version of the Kim Dotcom whole fiasco
But do you really need to pay him anything? I guess for mentioning the name and I guess that's a selling point.... But not even sure if that's needed, like if I make a movie about somebody's life what really need permission for? Their image? I mean if I have somebody different but same story would that count? Idk.. I never quite got an idea of exactly up to which point you need to deal with the person of the story or their family
He also promoted a trypto scam. Guess some people never change
Now that’s thinking way too big. This dude is not a household name like Facebook. You’d probably have to ask a few hundred people on the street before one says they know who he is. His story is also not at all interesting like Catch Me or Wolf. Granted, most people probably didn’t know who Belfort was, but his story was wild and constantly evolving and has a lot of story to tell. Zhong was just some crypto nerd who found one bug and stole a bunch of coin that he never touched, and in the meantime he used his other crypto money to buy friendship and drink. He’s worth a one part netflix doc at most.
Doesn’t matter if he’s a household name. They did it for the BlackBerry guys who no one knew the names of… the Nike guys who signed Jordan who no one knew the names of… and really recently - the GameStop meme stock guys - who I STILL don’t know the names of.
The story is fascinating enough that they wrote an article. And it rings just like one of those kinds of stories Hollywood LOVES to adapt into a visual medium.
I just had to look up all of those movies because I had no idea they'd made them. Those aren't exactly huge blockbuster live your life like a Rockefeller off the residuals movies. This guy might get a movie made about him but I think you're overstating it's potential worth. He might even be able to make a living through speaking engagements and the like but it's unlikely to make him rich. His heist is more niche interest than many others and I think your personal interest in it might be clouding that.
BlackBerry, household name. Jordan, Nike, household names. GameStop less so, but had tons of news and stories surrounding it, and it’s relatively recent. Having some idea of the subject drives interest, and these all have a journey within their stories. The Zhong story is boring as shit. The only reason headlines capture anyone’s attention is they can say it was a $3 billion dollar heist, when really it was a $600k heist with no interesting tale behind it except he looked through some code and found a bug. Maybe if he continually cashed the coins out and you know, was actually able to throw a billion+ dollars around and was constantly on the run you could make an interesting move. The dude stole the coin, stashed some hardware in his house, then accidentally called the cops on himself. What an amazing adventure, I can’t wait to watch it in theaters.