The Republican Party will survive Trump, if only so it can see this John McCain biopic

By Sam Barsanti | January 14, 2021 | 5:11pm

Aux Features Film

The Republican Party will survive Trump, if only so it can see this John McCain biopic

John McCain Photo: Shaun Heasley

Things are looking pretty grim for the Republican Party these days. Their chosen tyrant lost the election, incited a failed coup, and then got impeached (for a second time) because of it, not to mention the fact that Democrats now control the House and the Senate. Thankfully, the GOP has some projects to look forward to that look back at a happier time for right-wing assholes: Michael Douglas is set to play Republican messiah Ronald Reagan in a Paramount TV series opposite Christoph Waltz’s Mikhail Gorbachev, and Dennis Quaid is making a separate Reagan biopic with a cast that is truly… yeah. Anyway, Reagan’s not the only Republican icon who will be getting the biopic treatment, with Variety reporting that Stampede Ventures has picked up the rights to Mark Salter’s book The Luckiest Man: Life With John McCain and will be adapting the book into a movie.

Slater himself, a longtime friend and adviser to McCain, will be co-writing the script with The Good Wife produce Craig Turk, and Variety says the project has the support of the McCain family—meaning they’ll have no problem licensing all of his actual songs. (That’s a biopic joke.) That’s about all we know at this point, other than some glowing quotes about what a great guy John McCain was, so there’s not even any word on which excessively handsome actor is going to be starring in this. We also don’t know how much of McCain’s life it will cover since the 2008 presidential campaign with Sarah Palin wasn’t exactly a great moment for him and the times he half-heartedly stood up to Donald Trump will probably be even less exciting in a movie than they were in real life.