Second only to dark fairy tale adaptations, one of the most heated competitions in Hollywood is who will get to tell the story of WikiLeaks freedom fighter/supervillain Julian Assange—which is its own dark fairy tale, we suppose, what with the secret lairs and the alleged sex crimes. It’s straight out of Grimm! Anyway, one of the many, many WikiLeaks movies in contention just jumped to the front of the pack: The as-yet-untitled HBO-BBC co-production has hired Rowan Joffe, screenwriter of The American and 28 Weeks Later, to adapt last year’s New Yorker article, “No Secrets: Julian Assange’s Mission for Total Transparency.” Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall will produce while directing duties fall to Oscar-winning documentarian Charles Ferguson, the man who brought his own mission for total transparency to movies like Inside Job and No End In Sight. This automatically puts HBO’s WikiLeaks movie ahead of all other prospective WikiLeaks movies, particularly the one in development at DreamWorks. If you were also planning on making a WikiLeaks movie, maybe wait a bit.
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