London: Warner Bros, the studio behind Harry Potter and the DC superhero movies, is in talks to bring the story of the Brexit campaign to the big screen. According to a spokesman for Arron Banks, a leading donor of the movement to leave the EU, the studio is eager to adapt his memoir, The Bad Boys of Brexit.
Speaking to the Telegraph, Banks’s spokesperson Andy Wigmore said: “We have had some very serious Hollywood people in touch with us who are going to buy the rights to the book. They want to buy the option on it.”
Wigmore said Warner Bros representatives were keen to meet Banks and Nigel Farage when they are in the US later this month for the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. The Bad Boys of Brexit tells of the car insurance salesman’s rise to prominence after deciding to donate £1m to the UK Independence Party in October 2014, followed by a further £5m to various anti-EU causes.
The memoir’s official blurb reads: From a David Brent-style office on an industrial estate in the south-west, Banks masterminded an extraordinary social media campaign against the tyrannies of Brussels that became a mass movement for Brexit. He tore up the political rule book, sinking £8 million of his personal fortune into a madcap campaign targeting ordinary voters up and down the country.
His anti-establishment crusade upset everyone from Victoria Beckham to Nasa and left MPs open-mouthed. When his rabble-rousing antics landed him in hot water, he simply redoubled his efforts to wind up the targets. Lurching from comedy to crisis (often several times a day), he found himself in the glare of the media spotlight, fending off daily bollockings from Nigel Farage and po-faced MPs.
Wigmore reported that producers would not need to supplement their research much as “that book is like a screenplay, so half the work has been done for them”. He also declared that profits from the film would not directly wind up in either his or Farage’s pockets. “It is not like it is something we would personally benefit from.”
Speaking on 1 January, Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, dismissed the concept. “Movie executives must be doing a pretty expensive wind up or have had far too much to drink at a Christmas party to think it was a good idea,” he said. “It promises to be a horror flick found in the bargain bins.”
