Getty Image
UPDATE: The development of the film Killing Gawker by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon has been confirmed by the Hollywood trades. Gus van Zant, who directed Good Will Hunting, is in talks to direct the project.
Killing Gawker is an adaption of Ryan Holiday’s 2018 book Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
Original article:
Although it has not yet been confirmed, rumors indicate that longtime best buds and creative partners Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are set to star in another movie together.
The rumor comes from the wrestling news website PW Insider, which claims that Ben Affleck will be starring as legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan while Matt Damon will star as controversial venture capitalist Peter Thiel in a movie about the pair’s lawsuit against the website Gawker.
Filed in 2013, “Bollea v. Gawker” was a lawsuit filed by Hogan against Gawker Media for publishing a portion of a sex tape he made with a woman named Heather Clem, claiming personality rights, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
Hogan won the lawsuit against Gawker, forcing the website to claim bankruptcy and put itself up for sale. In November 2016, Gawker and Hogan reached a $31 million settlement.
Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, gave Hogan approximately $10 million to cover the legal fees of the Gawker suit, calling it “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done.” The speculation is that Thiel was retaliating against the website for a 2007 article that outed him as gay.
Ben Affleck will reportedly star as Hulk Hogan in a new film ‘GAWKER’
The film will likely follow the lawsuit between Hulk Hogan and website Gawker after they published a sex tape video that Hogan wasn't aware was being filmed.
(Source: https://t.co/9omKmr1Dcv) pic.twitter.com/mMhVzfQFf8
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) August 3, 2024
Thiel has been back in the news recently due to his connections and financial contributions to Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance.
“There are certainly certain parallels between the US in the 2020s to Germany in the 1920s, where liberalism is exhausted. One suspects that democracy, whatever that is, is exhausted. And we have to ask some questions very far outside the Overton Window,” Thiel said in an interview earlier this year.
If Affleck and Damon did make a movie about the Gawker lawsuit, it’ll be the third movie they’ve starred together in since the beginning of the 2020s, as they previously co-headlined Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and the Affleck-directed Nike film Air.