DraftKings, FanDuel surge and slide might become a movie

Remember what the sports landscape looked like approximately a year ago? It was around this time that ads from daily fantasy sports companies DraftKings and FanDuel began to permeate the airwaves, gobbling up hours of commercial time on game broadcasts, banners and boxes on sports highlight and analysis shows, and signs at professional stadiums throughout the country.

Daily fantasy sports was an industry ready to explode. Actually, maybe it did explode, shoveling in hundreds of millions of dollars from fantasy players and investments from professional sports teams, leagues and TV networks. But then state governments and attorneys began to question whether or not daily fantasy sports were gambling and if they were legal. Did those games need to be regulated? That growth was suddenly halted.

If that sounds like potential story material for a movie, TriStar Pictures agrees with you. As reported by Deadline’s Anita Busch, the studio has optioned the film rights to The Big Game, an upcoming book on the rise and fall of DraftKings and FanDuel by Sports Illustrated‘s Albert Chen.

The book isn’t scheduled to be published until next year, but TriStar obviously think it’s ideal for a movie adaptation and wanted to jump on nabbing those rights quickly. Getting the movie rights this early might allow producers to get a head start on development, and possibly have a finished film relatively soon after the book’s release — perhaps within a year or so. That’s obviously speculation, but there are big expectations attached to Chen’s book, which is being viewed as “The Big Short set in the world of fantasy sports.”

Drawing comparisons to Michael Lewis’ 2010 book on traders and analysts who saw the impending housing bubble burst of 2008 is certainly aiming high. There are parallels to an industry that grew faster than even its founders could have imagined, before it could consider every contingency that needed to be considered. But Adam McKay’s 2015 movie adaptation was successful because of how he distilled the story down to its most important elements and structured his film to move at a brisk pace.

Of course, the book and movie were also compelling because of the people involved who made great characters, such as the eccentric Dr. Michael Burry and combative Steve Eisman. The story of DraftKings and FanDuel may be loaded with potential characters, many of whom are mentioned in Don Van Natta Jr.s’ feature for ESPN The Magazine and Outside the Lines.

People such as DraftKings CEO and co-founder Jason Robins and Nigel Eccles, who co-founded FanDuel are almost certain to be part of the story. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who went after the two daily fantasy sports companies, seems like a natural.

Much like the analysts in The Big Short, The Big Game will likely feature many of the top-tier players who found out how to game the system with certain algorithms, some of whom actually worked for those daily fantasy sports companies. What about Ethan Haskell, the DraftKings employee who won $350,000 on FanDuel, presumably by having access to data most other fantasy gamers wouldn’t see, such as which NFL players were being used most by game participants?

But we’re probably getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Chen’s book, with the working title The Big Game: Daily Fantasy And The High Stakes Battle For Fans, Fortune And Survival, won’t be out until next year. And that means it could be quite a while before we see a movie adaptation. Fortunately for book publisher Houghton-Mifflin and TriStar Pictures, DraftKings and FanDuel will likely stay in the news for some time to come as their legal battles with various states continue and daily fantasy games pick up in popularity with the return of football season.

[Deadline]