Last night’s announcement of the death of the terrorist Osama bin Laden was incredible. I saw a small mention of it on Twitter, went out of my office to tell my girlfriend and about ten minutes later the social networking site was on fire with the news. By the time President Barack Obama gave his speech the story was over an hour old. It was a madhouse. Then there was the fact Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was the first to tweet any inkling of the news, that was until an IT consultant by the name of Sohaib Athar realized he had essentially live-tweeted the event. Next step… the big screen.
The Oscar-winning director and screenwriter of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, have been working on a project under the working title of Kill Bin Laden with hopes of shooting it before moving on to the duo’s larger project Triple Frontier with Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp tentatively attached. As it turns out, Boal, thanks to his access to military intelligence and his background as an investigative journalist had been following the hunt for bin Laden for some time. Even more fortuitous, he had actually been tracking the very team that ended up killing bin Laden.
While Deadline reported earlier this morning that the project was based on an earlier unsuccessful mission to try to kill bin Laden, sources close to Boal told Variety’s Justin Kroll that the screenwriter is still working on the script, and he will definitely include the 40-minute fire-fight at the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden was found and shot to death Sunday.
Deadline’s Mike Fleming does say he’s heard one time The Bourne Legacy candidate, Joel Edgerton, is on the list of possibles to star, which would be rather ironic considering the man that ended up with the Bourne job was Jeremy Renner whose current rise to fame is all due to his turn in Bigelow’s Hurt Locker.
Variety adds that the project is currently expected to go into production this summer for Megan Ellison’s Annapurna, but there are still issues concerning “location scouting, and the level of security that would be placed on the film.” Boal was reportedly planning a trip to Afghanistan next week but was forced to cancel due to recent events.
