The story of Megyn Kelly's harassment by Roger Ailes is heading to the big screen

Roger Ailes has become a hot intellectual property in Hollywood, for a Hollywood Reporter story suggests Megyn Kelly's contentious relationship with the former Fox News chairman will be the basis of a new movie from the team behind The Big Short. And since the producers behind Spotlight and ThePurge are already crafting a miniseries about Ailes with help of Gabriel Sherman — who wrote the Ailes-focused The Loudest Voice in the Room — audiences are about to suffer many Ailes.

The Kelly story was scooped up by Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures from a pitch by The Big Short co-writer Charles Randolph. His Academy Award-winning partner Adam McKay is currently working on a biopic about former vice president Dick Cheney, so it looks like film and television audiences are about to enter a golden age powerful old men's stories. However, as the Hollywood Reporter points out, a few producers are weary of taking on the project as whether or not they'll score Ailes and Kelly's life rights remains uncertain. Thankfully there is enough information available in the public domain to cover both, so Ellison and Randolph's team shouldn't have a problem.

Ailes's ousting from the cable news channel he helped build began after Gretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him in July. Several women, past and current Fox News employees alike, came forward claiming they too had been the victims of his inappropriate behavior. Chief among them was the Kelly File host, who outlined the unwanted advances from Ailes in her recent memoir Settle for More. Ailes has continually denied the charges.

It's way too early in the development process to discuss casting with any degree of certainty, but a few ideas about the Ailes miniseries have already come to light. Perhaps these would work just as well for the movie, no?

(Via the Hollywood Reporter)


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