Lionsgate Television is building a scripted collection dependent on the genuine-life gambling scandal involving Dodgers celebrity Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter.
The exhibit will follow Ohtani’s story — his meteoric rise in the MLB, his 10-year, $700-million agreement with the Dodgers and then the devastating information that his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, experienced allegedly stolen $17 million from him to pay out off gambling debts.
The Dodgers fired Mizuhara after mastering of the allegations. Mizuhara, 39, has agreed to plead responsible to one particular depend each and every of lender fraud and signing a phony tax return. He faces up to 33 many years in jail for the two crimes.
The series will be developed by Tony Award winner Scott Delman, known for “The E-book of Mormon” and “Raisin in the Sunshine,” and athletics journalist Albert Chen, Santa Monica-dependent Lionsgate explained Thursday.
“This is Major League Baseball’s biggest sports gambling scandal considering the fact that Pete Rose — and at its middle is its largest star, just one that MLB has hitched its wagon on,” Chen claimed in a assertion. “We’ll get to the coronary heart of the tale — a story of trust, betrayal and the trappings of wealth and fame.”
The Ohtani sequence is just the hottest in a extensive checklist of Tv shows and movies that have been ripped from the headlines. The 2018 rescue of a soccer staff from a cave in Thailand was the topic of two movies, a Netflix sequence and documentary and a Countrywide Geographic documentary. Very last year’s “Dumb Money” was centered on the genuine-everyday living Gamestop stock saga, a single of numerous Hollywood tasks that were being launched to capitalize on the meme stock sensation.
