The Bored Ape Yacht Club is being turned into not just one movie but three, and popular crypto company Coinbase is making it happen. You know, the company that signed a $1.36 million deal with ICE last year?
The first movie in the trilogy (which will actually be more of a short than a feature, it seems) will premiere at the NFT.NYC conference in June. BAYC members showed up in full force at last year’s NFT.NYC — tacking the collective’s first movie premiere to the conference makes perfect sense, really.
What, exactly, the “Degen Trilogy” (degen being short for “degenerate,” used to describe someone who buys crypto or NFTs without doing much research) will be about is still very unclear; the trilogy’s official website merely says “something is coming” and “probably nothing.” Logging into the site reveals just one tease: that the project is attached to “an incredible group of directors, writers, and animators.”
Bored Ape owners and non-owners alike can log into the site with a Coinbase Wallet address to access updates as the project progresses.
Crowdsourced to the fullest —
There’s a good reason Yuga Labs — the company behind BAYC — hasn’t given the public any clues about the trilogy’s plot. Yuga is asking Bored Ape owners to submit their Apes, along with a backstory for each, to audition for roles in the trilogy. Yuga is promising that a professional Hollywood casting director will be reviewing submissions.
If an owner’s Ape is chosen to be in the film, they’ll receive a $10,000 licensing fee, paid out either in bitcoin or ApeCoin. Unlike most NFTs, Ape owners receive full licensing rights when they purchase a BAYC NFT.
And the money just keeps flowing —
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is an outlier in the NFT community by just about any measure. In less than a year, the NFT collection has gone from just another tradable image collection to a full-on brand. BAYC owners are using their licensing rights to expand the collective’s reach as far as the restaurant industry. It’s entered the fashion world with an official Adidas collaboration. Celebrities like Madonna are buying them up. And now: movies.
The Bored Ape Yacht Club’s meteoric rise to fame hasn’t been without its bumps, though. Widespread allegations of racial insensitivity and connections to Nazism spread on social media earlier this year, casting doubt on the collective’s creators. (Yuga Labs profusely denies these allegations.)
