'Anchorman' Director Adam McKay Is Making a Movie About Former VP Dick Cheney

'Anchorman' director Adam McKay is making a Dick Cheney drama at Paramount.

Dick Cheney
Image via Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen
Dick Cheney

This world won't allow us to have a movie starring Will Ferrell as Ronald "Cooked Up an Answer" Reagan, so we'll just have to settle for the next best thing: an Adam McKay-directed movie about Dick Cheney. The esteemed Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby director will helm an untitled drama about Cheney for Paramount Pictures, Deadlineannounced Tuesday. McKay has already "quietly completed" the script and is expected to send it out to potential stars soon.

"I've always found Cheney fascinating," McKay toldDeadline of the script, which he started working on shortly after bagging the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his 2015 film The Big Short. "Questions of what drove him, what his beliefs were; but once we started digging I was astounded at how much he had shaped modern America's place in the world and how shocking the methods were by which he gained his power."

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The Cheney movie, which I really hope is simply entitled Dick, sees McKay reuniting with Big Short producers like Brad Pitt and his usual Gary Sanchez partners, Will Ferrell and Kevin Messick. Though Ferrell is not expected to wear any hat other than that of producer in McKay's Cheney film, it's worth noting that he is the same dude who's admirably gotten a ton of mileage out of ingeniously imitating George W. Bush:

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McKay is also working on Bad Blood with Jennifer Lawrence, a feature that earned him a hefty $3.5 million to script the real-life story of controversial Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. Theranos, a health-tech company, made headlines in 2015 when a pair of Wall Street Journal articles called into question the accuracy of their blood tests.

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