Every now and then you encounter a movie or TV premise that manages to bypass the frontal cortex entirely, instead taking root in some deep and ancestral part of the human brain. You hear it, and all rational considerations for how it might turn out to be dumb, or silly, or poorly executed gets dumped by the wayside, and all you can do is fixate on the glittery weirdness of the words. To pick an example not precisely at random: “Benedict Cumberbatch is making a TV show where he’s a thief who robs the Vatican in the midst of a papal conclave.” C’mon, you felt it, right?
This is per Deadline, reporting that A24 is the studio that acquired the rights to Nick Brucker’s novel White Smoke on Cumberbatch’s behalf. If you haven’t read the book, it’s because you’re not a time traveler: This is one of those “rights acquired despite the book not actually being out until next year” situations that seem increasingly common in Hollywood in recent years, presumably because studios are just as susceptible as the rest of us to the allure of a good pontiff heist. (It probably doesn’t hurt that supposedly first-time author Brucker is less of an unknown quantity in fiction than you might think, in so far as he’s a pen name for more established sci-fi and horror author Nicholas Binge; this’ll be Binge’s third book to get the adaptation treatment.)
Cumberbatch will both star in and produce the show, the official logline for which says it’s “set among a group of duplicitous con men and thieves determined to steal the Vatican’s most remarkable treasures during a papal conclave.” (In the version in our imagination, Cumberbatch has to, like, crawl along the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel while the cardinals are all below him voting, but we’ll admit that we may be allowing ourselves to get a bit too giddy at this point.)
Cumberbatch has been bouncing pretty regularly between the world of TV and film of late, having spent 2025 with film projects like The Roses and Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme, after starring in and producing Netflix limited series Eric in 2024.
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