Movies

Bin Laden the movie star?

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film reportedly focuses on the team that wound up killing the al-Qaeda leader

Bin Laden the movie star?

Jonathan Olley/Summit Entertainment/AP

Kathryn Bigelow may be glad her next movie is tentatively titled Kill Bin Laden. The independent film, which Bigelow has been trying to finance and cast as a follow-up to her Oscar-winning war drama The Hurt Locker, is said to focus on one of the U.S.’s failed attempts to take out the al-Qaeda mastermind. And according to Variety, the special forces unit she focuses on is “the very team that wound up killing the terrorist leader.” Literally overnight, the project is one of the “timeliest movies in Hollywood,” writes Deadline’s Mike Fleming.

It has company, though, since other studios have Osama bin Laden ideas languishing in development hell. Paramount has the rights to Jawbreaker, a book about how the U.S. let bin Laden escape at Tora Bora in December 2001. The studio has gone through several drafts of the script, including one Oliver Stone was attached to. Paramount even considered featuring Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan character in the hunt for public enemy No. 1.

Considering these projects were all developed when it seemed the U.S. would never catch bin Laden, the latest news out of Abbottabad, Pakistan, will undoubtedly alter the plots—or at least the endings. The Hollywood Reporter said that Bigelow and her Hurt Locker writer, Mark Boal, are “digesting the news and will spend the week figuring out their next move.”

Nobody was quick enough to beat Corey Feldman to the big screen. The day bin Laden died, the Gremlins actor was in Texas for a screening of the low-budget comedy Operation Belvis Bash, in which he stars as a Jewish comedian who travels to Afghanistan and helps liberate the country from a bin Laden-esque terrorist. “I walk out of the premiere,” Feldman said in a statement, “to learn that Osama bin Laden had been killed by a special operation, just like in the film we’d screened.” Feldman’s movie, however, didn’t take 10 years to make.

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