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Eugene Jarecki has teamed with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to launch his documentary “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, using what he calls a “pre-theatrical digital release” model
that will bring the film straight to the global Bitcoin community and the general public. It’s an effort to bypass U.S. studios and streamers that, he says, “were never going to touch this.”
The Emmy-winning American director and Dorsey, who now heads digital Bitcoin payments company Block, were in Tuscany, Italy, over the weekend, where they attended Rick Rubin’s under-the-radar music event Festival of the Sun. There, Dorsey held a conversation with Edward Snowden on digital freedom and the future of the web, marking a rare public interview for the former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance programs and now lives in Russia.
“The Six Billion Dollar Man,” which probes the U.S. government’s attempts to extradite Julian Assange from the U.K. and reveals how right-wing donor Sheldon Adelson used a Spanish security company to spy on Assange, won a top prize at the Cannes Films Festival in 2025 and scooped the first Golden Globe for Documentary award. Yet, Jarecki laments that no U.S. studio or streamer is willing to release the film. He and Dorsey are now circumventing the gatekeepers.
Below, Jarecki speaks to Variety about how the the Bitcoin community can give “The Six Billion Dollar Man” the visibility it’s being denied and why their fight is like “the Rebel Alliance against the Death Star” in “Star Wars.”
You reached out to Jack Dorsey for help distributing your film in the U.S. Why did you need to do that?
My story starts a little earlier. It starts with Prometheus in ancient Greece, because the Promethean logic is that the person who brought fire to humans was punished by the gods, because the gods wanted to keep the fire for themselves. So they strapped Prometheus to that rock to let birds of prey tear out his liver, which regenerates in perpetuity, so the torture is permanent. Now, it could be said that they wanted to punish Prometheus. But in fact, that act, the punishing of the messenger, is an act meant to make the rest of us not get any big ideas that we should use the fire ourselves.
In the film that I’ve made, Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, is sitting in front of the Parthenon and he tells the story of Julian Assange in the context of Prometheus. Because in a modern context, Julian Assange — whether you like him or not — brought human beings into the modern era of fire in the form of inviolable shedding of light that the powerful could not control. Because in the digital age, look at the vastness of the surveillance and manipulation and algorithmic control that we are now subject to. Assange saw that early, and provided a safe space for whistleblowers.
In the beginning of my story, Assange was blocked by the federal government in the United States, which used its long arms of power to cause Mastercard and Visa and PayPal to block payments to WikiLeaks, which is no different than the blocking of Prometheus. Then, they actually put Assange into a tortured period of detainment, like Prometheus. And then, ultimately, in a maximum security prison in Britain. Then, years later, the story about it likewise experiences a media blackout. We win two prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the first ever Golden Globe awarded to a documentary. And my mom is terribly proud. But I remember knowing, in the depth of my being, that the major streamers were never going to touch this; no matter what laurels were hung around its neck. Those laurels quickly become a noose. So every major outlet, every major streamer, wouldn’t touch this award-winning piece of Promethean inheritance. So, faced with that, what was I going to do?
I had heard that Jack Dorsey was a proponent of freedom of speech; a proponent of people power against the gatekeepers. I didn’t know more than that, and I’d never met him. But I sought to show him the film in hopes that he might say, “They don’t want people to see this film, but I do.” When we met, he had a much bigger idea for me. He basically said to me, “If I just fund what you’re doing, how am I any different than any of the other oligarchs meddling in public policy? What we need to do is ignite people power itself.” That was the visionary step that Jack made, and that group of people [Bitcoiners] turned out to be a target audience that he had in mind.
It’s been announced that Watermelon Pictures has taken U.S. theatrical distribution on the film, so it does have the prospect of getting into U.S. movie theaters.
We continue to plan to do a theatrical release with Watermelon. We are still very much walking side by side with each other. What’s fundamental is how community is needed to do the work that the mainstream system has no interest in doing, and is failing at. The change that came is that Jack and I are launching this radical idea for a pre-theatrical digital release, which is effectively the idea of creating a bow wave of people power in a target audience. So Watermelon is a part of a larger vision we have for how you first create the bow wave at a digital level. As you may know, the target audience that Jack has in mind are Bitcoiners. Why? Because in 2011, when the federal government manipulated the financial system to block Julian Assange and WikiLeaks from receiving public funding, it was Bitcoin that saved the day.
So on Saturday, there is going to be this “private watch party” which is going to kick off this Bitcoin-powered release. How exactly does this release work?
So the first tier of release of the film — and this was Jack’s vision, and it was very quickly adopted by my team — is that we bring on what are we are calling Bitcoin producers. So we opened up the doors of the film to Bitcoiners, who at a pretty substantial price point – 0.01 Bitcoin [worth $626.79 as of press time] put their money up and they became producers of the film. And they join round tables that we have developed. We work with their Bitcoin clubs. We are in their discussion forums. We start pushing the film forward, because it promotes a vision of the world that is harmonious with the Bitcoin vision of the world. Bitcoin is in the film, for example. But, far more importantly, this fight — it’s like “Star Wars,” the Rebel Alliance against the Death Star — is a vision that these people live in. And so do we. And so does Wikileaks. And I think most people, if they really gave it a moment’s thought, would be amazed to discover that “Star Wars,” from once upon a time, is actually reflected in the reality of today.
What are the next steps?
The subsequent phases will then widen [this digital release] to the general public. But there will be a “Bitcoin-preferred” tier as a kind of a particular opening for people who are Bitcoiners to continue to power the movie forward. The price point for Bitcoiners is higher, in a way, but they get far more. They get secret material that, frankly, the intelligence agencies don’t know we have. They get material that the world has not seen. And they get an inside track with us on the life of the movie, along the lines of what they most care about. The general public is then the beneficiary of this pay-it-forward model.
It’s safe to say Bitcoiners will be paying a lot more to see the film than people would pay for in a movie theater, am I right?
It ain’t a movie ticket. When it goes out wide, the price point will drop for the general public. We will drop it in phases. But we want it to be ultimately affordable to everybody. So it’s the steps along the way. Each step pays it forward to enable the next step to happen. This is crucial, since documentary releases otherwise get ghettoized into just being in neighborhoods that have fancy arthouses.
Do you expect these people to be watching your film on a computer screen?
The watch party is generally a computer-based event where a live image of the film plays at a certain moment online, and you need an access code to enter the site where it’s playing, and you can’t duplicate that access code once you’re a Bitcoin producer. However, we have many Bitcoin producers who have come to us and said, “Hey, I want to hold a screening in my community. I want to fill a movie theater with Bitcoiners and what they call ‘normies,’ with everyday people whom we just want to spread this message to.” One of the things that Bitcoin producers are doing is bringing in a community across the world of people who want to hold those screenings in their communities, and that’s what we mean, in part, by “pay it forward.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
