A movie director who received $11 million dollars from streaming giant Netflix to make a sci-fi series has instead lost all the money by doing option trading, said a report on Thursday.
Filmmaker Carl Rinsch deposited $10.5 million into his Charles Schwab trading account and lost over half of it by trading options, reported New York Times.
In 2018, Netflix bought a sci-fi series from Rinsch. By 2020, Netflix spent $44 million on the show.
With production floundering, Rinsch demanded $11 million more from Netflix and quickly lost $6 million in option trading on pharma stocks.
However, he invested $4 million into Dogecoin, a dog-themed cryptocurrency, and turned it into $27 million. Netflix stopped funding the project and are suing Rinsch, said the report.
NYT reported that Rinsch, in 2021, had bet that shares of the biotech firm Gilead Sciences would soar. Another bet was that the S&P 500 index would fall further and instead he lost $5.9 million in a matter of weeks.
Netizens couldn't stop having fun at the expense of Netflix and said that the streaming giant has a "good movie plot" on its hands.
"They will own the rights to the story, make a documentary about his fraud, play it on Netflix and recoup some of their loss," joked an X user.
The only feature film Rinsch had directed prior to this was Keanu Reeves-starrer '47 Ronin', which has a 16% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.