Ready Entertainment’s Ashley D. Bell and Dr. Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., have partnered with Adam Ciralsky’s P3 Entertainment to produce content that centers diverse and underrepresented voices and emphasizes social issues.
Bell and Dr. King are the founders of Ready Life, a financial tech platform that partners with banks to help those with poor credit scores obtain home loans and build generational wealth. They co-founded Ready Entertainment in February 2023 with the intent to disrupt Hollywood’s production process in the way they disrupted finance.
“We feel we can make Hollywood more efficient by going directly to buyers,” Bell says. “Underrepresented creatives get locked out of the system because they have to go through a lot of hurdles and middlemen to get their projects to market, and by the time they’ve done so, they’ve lost the majority of the equity in their content. We want to support those creatives so that they maintain a strong ownership in their IP.”
Ciralsky is a Vanity Fair journalist whose experience working in the CIA inspired the Netflix series The Recruit, which became one of the streamer’s most-watched series upon its debut in 2022. He founded P3 in 2018 out of frustration with the way Hollywood had adapted his articles for film and TV.
“Hollywood frequently marginalizes content creators,” Ciralsky says. “Not only did I have a frustrating time breaking in, but I’ve seen far too many colleagues in journalism have the same experience. Our company puts creators first.”
Ciralsky leapt at the opportunity to partner with Bell and Dr. King, who made a seven-figure investment in P3. “I viewed it as a huge vote of confidence in our efforts to diversify voices in entertainment,” Ciralsky said. “They are people who have the courage of their convictions.”
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Speaking of Dr. King, Ciralsky said that “nobody speaks more eloquently about the power of TV and film. In every interaction I have with her, I learn something.”
Bell also spoke highly of his longtime business partner, comparing her to her father. “When she talks about the inseparable twins of racial and economic injustice that her father spoke about,” Bell said, “I think it really hits home. You cannot have a conversation about racial justice in this country unless you’re also talking about economic justice.”
Ready Entertainment’s first project will be the feature film Cash Money, directed by Kevin Arbouet and written by Terry Rossio, the Academy-Award-nominated screenwriter of Shrek whose other credits include the 1992 Aladdin and the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Bell describes Cash Money as a buddy comedy centered around the financial crises faced by marginalized communities.
“Cash Money is about what happens when people lose faith in their institutions, and what would happen when people who are the ones who get left behind come up with the solutions,” he said. “We think it’s funny and entertaining, and that it might spark some ideas about a better way of having a financial system in our country that values everyday people’s work and labor.”
