With tonight’s news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, I joked Paul Greengrass was already negotiating terms for a film version. It turns out it wasn’t far from the truth. Last December we reported that The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow and scribe Mark Boal were re-teaming on a $10 million Black Ops film, to shoot before their higher budget feature Triple Frontier, which has Tom Hanks attached and Johnny Depp rumored to star.
It was then reported that the smaller budget thriller involved the quest to hunt down Bin Laden and then that rumor was shot down by Boal’s reps, but it seems they could have been simply covering up the development. We got news soon after that Megan Ellison‘s Annapurna Pictures greenlit the project and it was set to shoot this summer. The film savior who is helping to finance the next films from Paul Thomas Anderson, Andrew Dominik, John Hillcoat, and Charlie Kaufman only said the following, “this is an exciting, involving story in the tradition of the best film thrillers. That it is fact-based makes it all the more relevant and fascinating for a worldwide audience.”
Deadline now reports that Bigelow has been prepping the film under the working title Kill Bin Laden and it indeed follows the failed missions to capture the Al Qaeda leader while he “hid in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan.” With tonight’s news, it seems like Boal now has the perfect ending. The project is still under wraps, with reps not confirming these details. They’ve even previously said the film isn’t “specifically about” Bin Laden, but they are certainly interested in getting it started. As recently as Friday, Animal Kingdom star and the upcoming lead of The Thing, Joel Edgerton (who was in the running for The Bourne Legacy), had spoken to Bigelow and Boal about starring in the project. There is no update to this project since Bin Laden has been killed, nor word if it will mean a longer development process to get the facts straight. This isn’t the only possible adaptation of the this story though.
There is also another related project Paramount Pictures optioned five years ago, titled Jawbreaker. Oliver Stone was interested in the film based on a book by “U.S. intelligence operative Gary Berntsen about the December 2001 American-led military mission to hunt and kill Bin Laden.” This took place in the beginning of our 9/11 retaliation and the novel even notes “how close those forces came to finding and executing Bin Laden in the rugged mountains of Tora Bora.” Cyrus Nowrasteh handled the latest draft of the script, rewriting Berntsen’s co-author Ralph Pezzullo, but the project fizzled out. There is even reports of a Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan film surrounding the hunt, but that also stalled. With this timely project, I’m confident this isn’t the last news we’ll hear about a film adaptation. Stay tuned for updates on a film version of this evolving story.
Do you think we need a film adaptation of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden? Who would you be interested in handing such a project?