Eugene Jarecki has teamed up with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to release “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” a documentary about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The model utilizes what he calls a “pre-theatrical digital release” model to bring the film directly to the global Bitcoin community and the general public. This is an effort to get around American studios and streamers who “were never going to touch this,” he said.
Dorsey, an Emmy Award-winning American filmmaker and current head of digital Bitcoin payment company Block, was in Tuscany, Italy over the weekend, attending Rick Rubin’s low-key music event Festival of the Sun. There, Mr. Dorsey spoke with Edward Snowden about digital freedom and the future of the web, leaked top secret documents about the United States’ extensive surveillance programs, and is a rare public interview for a former CIA official who now lives in Russia.
The Six Billion Dollar Man, which investigated the U.S. government’s efforts to extradite Julian Assange from Britain and revealed how right-wing donor Sheldon Adelson used a Spanish security firm to spy on Assange, won the top prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and won his first Golden Globe for best documentary. But Jarecki laments the reluctance of U.S. studios and streamers to release the film. He and Dorsey are now bypassing the gatekeepers.
Below, Jarecki talks to Variety about how the Bitcoin community can give the Six Billion Dollar Man the visibility he’s been denied, and why their fight is like the Rebel Alliance against the Death Star in Star Wars.
You asked Jack Dorsey to help you distribute the film in America. Why did you want to do that?
My story begins a little earlier. It begins with Prometheus in ancient Greece. For Prometheus’s logic is that those who brought fire to humans were punished by the gods, because the gods wanted fire for themselves. So they tied Prometheus to the rock and let the birds of prey tear out his liver. The liver will permanently regenerate, so the torture will continue forever. Now, you could say they wanted to punish Prometheus. But in reality, that act, the Messenger’s punishment, is an act to keep the rest of us from getting the big idea that we ourselves should use fire.
In the film I made, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis sits in front of the Parthenon and tells the story of Julian Assange in relation to Prometheus. Because in the modern context, Julian Assange, whether you like him or not, has brought humanity into the modern era of fire in the form of an inviolable light that cannot be controlled by those in power. Because look at the enormous amount of surveillance and manipulation and algorithmic control that we are now exposed to in the digital age. Assange recognized this early on and provided a safe haven for whistleblowers.
At the beginning of my story, Assange was stopped by the US federal government, which used its long powers to block Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal from making payments to WikiLeaks, no different than the Prometheus blockade. And they actually put Assange into a torturous Prometheus-like detention period. He was eventually sent to a maximum security prison in the UK. A few years later, articles on the subject were similarly censored by the media. It won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival, including the first Golden Globe Award for a documentary. And my mother is very proud. But I remember knowing deep down that the big streamers would never touch this. No matter what laurel wreath is hung around your neck. Those laurels will soon become nooses. So all the major media, all the major streamers, will never touch this award-winning Promethean legacy. So, let’s face it, what was I going to do?
I had heard that Jack Dorsey was a champion of free speech. Supporters of people power against gatekeepers. I didn’t know much more about him than that, and I’d never met him. But I tried to show him this movie in hopes that he would say, “They don’t want me to see this movie, but I want to see it.” He had bigger ideas for me when we met. He essentially said, “If I’m just going to fund what you’re doing, how am I any different than any other oligarchy that interferes in public policy? What we have to do is ignite people power itself.” This was a visionary step taken by Jack, as that group (Bitcoiners) turned out to be the target audience he had in mind.
It has been announced that Watermelon Pictures will be distributing the film in theaters in the United States, so it is likely that it will be released in theaters in the United States.
“Watermelon” is scheduled to be released in theaters in the future. We still walk alongside each other. Fundamentally, it’s about how we need communities to do the work that mainstream systems are uninterested in and failing to do. The change that came about was that Jack and I launched this radical idea of a digital release before a theatrical release. This is effectively the idea of creating an arching wave of people power in the target audience. So Watermelon is part of a larger vision that we have about how to create bow waves on a digital level for the first time. As you may know, the target audience Jack has in mind is Bitcoiners. why? Because when the federal government manipulated the financial system to block public funding for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks in 2011, it was Bitcoin that saved the day.
Therefore, on Saturday, a “Private Watch Party” will be held to begin the release using this Bitcoin. How exactly does this release work?
So the first phase of the film’s release, and this was Jack’s vision and was quickly adopted by my team, is that we bring in what we call Bitcoin producers. So we opened the door to the film to Bitcoiners, who put up the money at a pretty high price point, 0.01 Bitcoin (equivalent to $626.79 at the time of writing), and they became the film’s producers. And they will join the round table that we have developed. We are working with their Bitcoin Club. We participate in their discussion forums. We begin promoting this film because it promotes a worldview that is in harmony with the Bitcoin worldview. For example, this movie features Bitcoin. But far more importantly, this battle, the Rebel Alliance’s “Star Wars” take on the Death Star, is the vision these people live by. And so do we. And so is WikiLeaks. And I think most people, if they give it any serious thought, will be surprised to discover that what was once “Star Wars” is actually reflected in today’s reality.
What’s the next step?
At a later stage, (this digital release) will be made widely available to the general public. But there is a “Bitcoin First” tier as a kind of special entry point for Bitcoiners to keep the movie moving forward. In a way, Bitcoiner prices are higher, but you get more. They get secret material that, frankly, intelligence agencies don’t know we have. They get material the world has never seen before. And they can get inside information with us about the life of the movie, along the lines of what they care about most. The general public will be the beneficiary of this pay-it-forward model.
It’s safe to say that Bitcoin enthusiasts will end up paying far more money to see a movie than people would pay in theaters.
It’s not a movie ticket. Once it is widely available, the price for the general public will drop. We will remove it gradually. But ultimately we want it to be affordable for everyone. So, this is an intermediate step. Each step pays forward to allow the next step to occur. This is very important, because otherwise documentary releases would become ghettoized, just located in neighborhoods with fancy arthouses.
Do you think these people are watching your movie on a computer screen?
A watch party is typically a computer-based event where a live image of a movie is played online at a specific moment, and you need an access code to enter the site where it’s being played, but once you become a Bitcoin producer, you can’t duplicate that access code. But there are a lot of Bitcoin producers who came to us and said, “Hey, I want to host a screening in my community. I want to fill the movie theater with Bitcoiners and people they call “normals” and regular people who just want us to spread this message. ” One of the things Bitcoin producers are doing is bringing in a community of people around the world who want to host screenings in their own communities. That’s partly what we mean by “pay it forward.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
