"I've had a career in Moscow, a career in Wall Street and a career in Washington. They're all highly dysfunctional, sharp-edged, dishonest places, but I've never seen something so dishonest as Hollywood. It's unbelievable. Everything they do in Hollywood would be illegal in any other place."

That's author and financier Bill Browder speaking (in a 2019 interview to financial news site MarketWatch) about his rocky experience trying to get a film made out of his bestselling 2015 memoir "Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man's Fight for Justice."

While trying to get his film made, he reportedly had big-name star George Clooney ("The Monuments Men," 2014) and Oscar-nominated scriptwriter William Nicholson ("Unbroken," 2014) attached, but it got bogged down in "development hell" (Hollywood's term for an extended period of negotiations that may or may not lead to a production).

While it languished, Dwayne Johnson ("Skyscaper," 2018) and Netflix swept in and stole the title for their 2021 action comedy starring the former wrestling superstar alongside Ryan Reynolds ("Deadpool," 2016) and Gal Gadot ("Wonder Woman," 2017).

To be fair, no one owns the name "Red Notice," except maybe Interpol. It's the term for an international arrest order issued by the police agency, and is where both the book and the film take their names -- after all, both properties are, in their own way, about cross-border crime.

While Johnson's movie is a fun heist romp, there's not a lot of fun in Browder's book. Instead, it's the story of his time as a financier in Russia during the lawless years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of his attempts to get justice for his friend and lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Russian custody.

While there has been no movement so far on an adaptation of Browder's book, Johnson's film has been a smash hit, and Netflix has already greenlit not one but two sequels.

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