It was bound to happen, we just didn’t anticipate it happening this fast, but a documentary about Luigi Mangione — the man who shot the UnitedHealthcare CEO — is already in the works. Under the direction of Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, the film will no doubt dig into the machinations behind the murder and why the 26-year-old has become something of a uniting folk hero in American society.
Gibney will produce and direct the film for Anonymous Content and his own Jigsaw Productions. According to Variety, “The new doc … will explore how killers are created, what this killing says about our society, and the values we place on who lives and who dies.”
Who are Luigi Mangione, Alex Gibney, and What Do We Know So Far About the Doc?
On December 4, it is alleged that Luigi Mangione shot United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in broad daylight, in the back, before he was set to speak at an investor conference. The shooting has put in stark relief the state of healthcare in America — namely that it costs thousands of people their lives every year, due to denied claims or patients often amassing life-changing amounts of debt in order to stay healthy — and has become a lightning rod for the fed up populace of this country. The United States is currently the only developed nation without some form of universal healthcare, and insurance companies have racked up billions of dollars in profits off the backs of hardworking Americans forced to endure a cruel system that rarely provides them with the care they need. So is anyone really all that surprised that Mangione has become a bit of a folk hero across the deep-seated political divide in this country?
Mangione’s shooting of Thompson has turned him into something of a folk hero for many Americans, fed up and exhausted by the unhelpful, draining system that puts shareholder profits above the health and well-being of the people it is allegedly intended to serve.
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Though not, allegedly, a customer of United Healthcare, Mangione suffered from a debilitating back injury that may have set him on the course to murder the CEO, as United is known for rejecting twice as many claims as the industry average. Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate from Maryland, has not yet been indicted. He has, however, retained the legal services high-powered New York attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo after being arrested at a McDonalds’ in Pennsylvania days later. When he was picked up he had a manifesto on him which referenced another documentarian, Michael Moore, who put out a documentary in 2007 about the state of the American healthcare system called Sicko.
People, of course, immediately began speculating about what a film about Mangione would look like, and have already suggested casting Dave Franco as Mangione due to their similar looks. And while a narrative film about the killing feels inevitable given the surrounding circumstances, nothing is currently in the works. With many developments in the case yet to come, Hollywood is likely waiting for the outcome before it begins shaping a script for its cinematic gains. It feels all but guaranteed that people are shopping a limited series and/or films based on the moment of vigilantism that’s captivated the nation.
Gibney is most well known for his searing social commentary via documentary filmmaking. He is currently working on a film about Elon Musk, and has previously focused his damning lens on other controversial figures, such as Elizabeth Holmes and her doomed company Theranos (called The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley). He won an Academy Award in 2008 for his documentary Taxi to the Dark Side about US torture and interrogation practices during the war in Afghanistan. He may be most well-known, however, for his documentaries about Enron (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and Scientology (Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief).
There is no release date for Alex Gibney’s Luigi Mangione documentary.