Onion Futures Act

Motion picture box office receipts seems like a form of gambling as there is no natural massive purchasing counter party that cares the way that a farmer wants to avoid the price falling too much and the restaurant wants to avoid the price rising too much and both might want to lock in their price.

someone did a very detailed proposal to create box office futures - bet on how much money a movie will make, hedge against a flop after your big marketing budget was spent to make it awesome - the CFTC (futures regulator) was super into it, like too into it, and wanted to extend regulations to movie studios internally like information firewalls just like is seen in investment banks, so that people felt the market was fair. the MPAA was really against that, and used their lobbying muscle to get Congress to ban it completely before it ever happened. They slid it inside the financial reform bill that was made to address the overleveraged real estate derivatives after the 2008 financial crisis.

I think it would have been a lot of fun, and in 2023 we have semi-unstoppable onchain prediction markets with moderate levels of liquidity now in the crypto space.

But yeah, lots of bad faith power moves by everyone in this case.