By Jason Apuzzo. As you may have heard by now, the word in the industry (see here and here) is that Sony is negotiating to distribute Kathryn Bigelow’s long-gestating movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, a movie that’s changed – unsurprisingly – since bin Laden’s demise at the hands of Navy SEAL Team 6. According to Nikki Finke over at Deadline:
Mark Boal, Bigelow’s partner on the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, is finalizing a script that changes the film from a drama about an unsuccessful attempt to hunt the Al Qaeda leader into a methodical hunt that culminates in his death. The film is being fully financed by Megan Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures. Production will start in the early fall and the pic will be ready for release in 2012.
The project currently has no title, and is apparently projected to have a budget between $25 million-$30 million. Producer Megan Ellison is the daughter of Oracle’s Larry Ellison, and she also recently paid $20 million for the rights to the Terminator franchise. Additionally, her brother David Ellison is the person currently trying to revive the Top Gun franchise, as well as Star Blazers. So the Ellison siblings are obviously becoming major players here.
On balance, I think this is very good news – a promising development – and we’ll obviously look forward to the film. Ideally I’d love to see a project of this sort have a higher budget in the $100 million range, but that sort of thing depends on the how the story is being told. Certainly a great deal can be done these days using digital technology on a $30 million budget.
Bravo to Megan Ellison for stepping up quickly and making this happen, and congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow. Govindini and I met her briefly while she was doing post-production on K-19, and she couldn’t have been nicer. LFM NON-SUBLIMINAL HINT: Chris Hemsworth would make a great SEAL …
UPDATE: I’d like to add, on a further note, that I think it’s wonderful and appropriate that the producer/financier and director of the ‘getting bin Laden’ movie are both women.
Posted on May 25th, 2011 at 12:53pm.
This is good news and despite the miserly budget it doesn’t preclude this from being an excellent movie. Kathryn is one of the few directors today that can film action realistically for cinema and not over choreograph it, Matrix style. Although The Hurt Locker had the usual Hollywood portrayal (or should I say betrayal) of American soldiers as victims and crazy. I still enjoyed it a great deal mostly due to the action scenes and in particular the sniper duel.
Agreed, JG.
New photo caption:
Hey, eyes are up here, buddy…
Right! I noticed that …