Times reports Harvey Weinstein will get movie treatment
Two prominent Hollywood production companies have acquired the rights to produce a film based on The New York Times’ coverage of sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein, The Times confirmed on Thursday.
The movie will follow the work of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, investigative reporters at The Times, and their editor, Rebecca Corbett. The team’s reporting on Weinstein helped set off the #MeToo movement and earn The Times a Pulitzer Prize for public service.
The rights were bought by Plan B, a production company co-founded by Brad Pitt that produced “12 Years a Slave” and “Moonlight,” and Annapurna Pictures, founded by Megan Ellison, the company behind “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Phantom Thread.”
In October, an article by Kantor and Twohey revealed decades of sexual harassment allegations against Weinstein, one of the most powerful executives in Hollywood. That article, along with reporting by Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, led to a global movement that would expose sexual misconduct by prominent men in numerous industries, as well as the everyday sexism and abuse experienced by millions of women.
Subsequent Times articles revealed many more victims of Weinstein’s harassment, including actresses Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow. By the end of October, the list of known allegations stretched back to the 1970s and Weinstein had been fired from his company. The Times later documented how Weinstein’s abuses went unchecked for decades with help from his associates.
After the news broke, Weinstein told The Hollywood Reporter, “The story sounds so good, I want to buy the movie rights.” He was soon fired from the movie company he co-founded.
The movie deal, first reported Wednesday by Deadline Hollywood, stemmed from a new partnership between The Times and Anonymous Content’s media rights division. Kantor and Twohey are also writing a book for Penguin Press.
Despite the challenges facing the media industry, journalism has become a hot subject for mass entertainment. The movie “Spotlight,” about the Boston Globe investigation that uncovered sexual abuse of children within the Roman Catholic Church, won best picture at the 2016 Academy Awards, and “The Post,” about The Washington Post’s efforts to publish the Pentagon Papers, was a box office hit in late 2017 and early 2018.
Next month, Showtime will start airing a prime-time documentary series, “The Fourth Estate,” that follows a group of Times journalists in New York and Washington as they cover the Trump administration and other major stories.
Director Liz Garbus was granted behind-the-scenes access to the paper for more than a year. And on Wednesday, Netflix announced a weekly series, “Follow This,” that accompanies BuzzFeed News journalists as they report on a range of subjects. The series, produced in partnership with BuzzFeed, is scheduled to start streaming in July.