Billion Dollar Projects
With the Power Ball lottery pushing $0.5Billion*, I decided to share some of my “billion dollar projects,” that is projects that I might undertake if I had a billion or more dollars that I could throw at some project without regard to their ability to actually make any money. These aren’t necessarily projects that would loose money, but I wouldn’t undertake them without being willing to spend as much money as possible without thought of return.
In no particular order:
Project 1: A Game of Thrones like adaptation of Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series.
The plan would be to have a competent team adapt the six book each into 10 (or so) one-hour episodes. I suspect that the practical considerations of the stories would require heavy or exclusive use of CGI. These include characters who fly, creatures not found on earth, major non-human characters, and a main character who must go from a young-looking and small 15 to a tall 24 or 25 over the course of about six years of filming and air time.
Interestingly, we are almost to the point where the main challenges would be technical, since it could be distributed through some sort of a direct-to-viewer channel (either pay-per-episode, or stream now, buy DVD later, or a combination).
Project 2: Similar for Orson Scott Card’s whole Enderverse, or a series of movie-length adaptations.
The Hollywood adaptation of Ender’s Game would have some impact on this, but my plan would be to use photo-realistic CGI (or as close as can be done) to allow the characters to realistically age, and other related factors.
Project 3: A stuffed sopapilla food truck for San Diego (or San Diego and LA). Tara even has a name (and color scheme) for it: Red or Green.
The plan would be to hire a couple of cooks who would go to New Mexico and learn techniques of making sopapillas, carne adovada, and other distinctly New Mexican dishes, who would then run the truck - probably with a decent profit-share plan.
I think this could actually do pretty well. The food would be uncommon, but comfortably close to other food available in the area. And most of the major work would be able to be done ahead of time, offsite.
Project 4: A new concept recording of Godspell made with Contemporary Christian Music artists and bands.
This might require some tweaking of lyrics, but given that most of them actually come from old Anglican hymns, I think the tweaks might be minimal.
I’m sure I’ve had some others, but these are all I can think of at the moment.
Oh, there are various things like paying for the San Diego Convention Center expansion, or buying The Chargers and moving them out of town. Or building them a new stadium. Then give it to them with the requirement that the property and facilities must transfer with the team unless they move out of San Diego, and that they cannot ask for any tax money for improvements. This stadium wouldn’t be tied in any way to the convention center expansion.