It was surely only a matter of time before Hollywood’s biggest studios set their eyes on the world’s most famous hacker-activist’s incredible story. There you have it: Steven Spielberg has secured the rights to WIKILEAKS: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, the book authored for PublicAffairs by David Leigh and Luke Hardin, two journalists of the British Guardian –media partner, together with the New York Times and Der Spiegel, of the revelations from the highly confidential diplomatic cables.






In order to tap into a broader source of information, the American producer and film-director bought also the rights to Inside WikiLeaks penned by former executive, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. Apparently Spielberg is planning to turn the books into a thriller along the lines of “All the President’s men” to be produced in association with DreamWorks, the company he founded about seventeen years ago with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.





In the meanwhile, many production companies are already thinking about a documentary: the screenwriter of The Hurt Locker, Mark Boal and Management 360 have teamed up with producer Megan Ellison to option an article about Assange in the New York Times magazine written by editor Bill Keller while Universal will finance and distribute a biopic on Assange directed by Alex Gibney, the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.



Andrea Rinaldi