After a solid week of exceptionally fevered Hollywood wheeling and dealing, the movie project with Jennifer Lawrence attached to portray Elizabeth Holmes—founder of the embattled blood-testing company Theranos—and Adam McKay on board as writer-director has finally landed a buyer.

Legendary Pictures snapped up rights to the hot-button biopic for a reported $3 million Thursday evening, after outbidding and outlasting a swarm of competition from Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, STX Entertainment, Regency Enterprises, Cross Creek, Amazon Studios, AG Capital, the Weinstein Company, and, in the penultimate stretch, Paramount, among other studio suitors.

“The numbers are very reasonable,” says a source close to the deal who declined to be identified because the person was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. “It was more about the quality of the package.”

Based on a book proposal by two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou titled Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in Silicon Valley, the project (reported to be in the $40 million to $50 million budget range) has made the rounds to almost every studio in town. It’s been personally pitched by McKay, who won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for last year’s rollicking financial meltdown procedural The Big Short.

“They basically tell the story of how Elizabeth Holmes created these fraudulent blood-testing machines, raised $9 billion through venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, and refuses to admit they don’t work even when it is obvious the testing is inaccurate,” says a studio source familiar with how the project was pitched. “They employ a big-time litigator and threaten to sue anyone who challenges her.”

A package deal stoking the ardor of so many major distributors simultaneously is about as rare as an albino mountain lion sighting in Runyon Canyon. But this deal had been a movie-industry darling since Deadline first broke news of McKay and Lawrence’s involvement on June 17.

“They are two pieces of talent that you want to be in business with,” said another executive at one of the companies bidding on the property who also requested anonymity. “They are both white hot. And there was a resonant pitch.”

Moreover, *Bad Blood’*s awards-season calculus is beyond reproach. Lawrence, the Academy Award-winning Most Bankable Female Star in the Universe™, playing America’s youngest self-made female billionaire in a boom-bust biopic would probably be enough to get the production green-lighted on her own. But add in McKay’s experience spinning investment esoterica like super-collateralized debt obligation into bankable mainstream entertainment (The Big Short made $133 million worldwide), and a macro-narrative illuminating Wall Street’s sweet tooth for showy Silicon Valley disruptors, and the project practically sells itself. “We dropped out because the deal got too crazy,” the first source explains.

Perhaps not as crazy as the real story of Theranos. Founded in 2003 by hematology head-turner Holmes—a Stanford dropout with a penchant for black turtlenecks and an abiding fear of hypodermic needles who was once hailed as the next Steve Jobs—the blood-testing start-up touted revolutionary technology aimed at detecting everything from cancer to high cholesterol with just a pinprick of blood. After reaping hundreds of millions of dollars in private funding and becoming a star in the Silicon Valley tech press, the Holmes-led Theranos saw its value shoot to $9 billion. Following scrutiny from Carreyrou at The Wall Street Journal and other outlets, Theranos issued tens of thousands of corrected blood tests. Then came the loss of a lucrative partnership with Walgreens, its valuation plunging to a relatively teensy $800 million, and Holmes going essentially broke.