From Blood Screen to Silver Screen: Theranos Goes Hollywood

Medical labs are not usually the stuff of Hollywood. But the story of Theranos and its charismatic leader, Elizabeth Holmes, has attracted film makers the way regular law-abiding labs never do.

The Theranos Story Line

In case you’ve forgotten, Ms. Holmes is the Stanford University dropout who, clad in black turtlenecks like her idol and inspiration, Steve Jobs, positioned Theranos as the lab industry’s version of Apple. Her pitch centered around breakthrough finger-stick miniaturization technology supposedly capable of testing microscopic samples as accurately and a lot more conveniently than any other lab on the planet could.

Investors were impressed and soon billions of dollars of capital were flowing into Theranos. At its peak, The Wall Street Journal valued the company at over $9 billion. And it wasn’t just Silicon Valley and Wall Street. High-profile retailers like Walgreens fell for the pitch and eagerly sought to align themselves with Theranos. The media, too, fell under the Ms. Holmes’ charm and lauded her as a visionary.

But not all of the media. WSJ reporter John Carreyou was among the first to spot signs of trouble in the form of disgruntled former Theranos employees who had been previously intimidated to keep their insider doubts to themselves. With the help of some brave whistleblowers, Carreyou was able to piece together the story that Theranos’ groundbreaking technology was nothing of the sort. Theranos not only used analyzers from other manufacturers but did so in ways that violated federal CLIA guidelines.

Regulators swooped in and soon Theranos was up to its eyeballs in legal troubles—revocation of CLIA certification, consumer fraud, stock fraud and a massive lawsuit by previous partner Walgreens. By the end of 2018, Theranos was out of money and out of business and Ms. Holmes and her former partner Sunny Balwani faced criminal fraud and conspiracy charges. While investors lost billions, the true victims of the Theranos lie were the patients who relied on the inaccurate test results generated by Theranos labs.

Theranos On Screen

But interest in Theranos did not end with the company’s dissolution. HBO was the first to recognize the entertainment value of the Theranos story, producing an investigative documentary “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” that premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in January and aired on the network two months later.

And now a feature film, called “Bad Blood,” which is reportedly based on Mr. Carreyou’s book of the same title, is currently in production, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Ms. Holmes. Of course, by the time the film premieres, Ms. Holmes might have been forced to trade in her black turtlenecks for an orange one-piece.

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This article originally appeared in G2 Intelligence, National Intelligence Report, May 2019