Osama Assassination To Become A Movie!

By now, the world has gotten used to the reality of the news. Osama bin Laden is dead. Killed in a search & destroy mission by a team of elite Navy SEALS in Islamabad on Sunday night. It’s the stuff of Tom Clancy novels and Hollywood action thrillers. Literally. Variety has just reported that a film about the Osama assassination is being planned. Out of sheer coincidence, director Kathryn Bigelow had been working on a project about a Black Ops team whose mission was to hunt down the world’s most wanted terrorist. Bigelow, who won a Best Director Oscar in 2009 for “The Hurt Locker” had reunited with her writer on that film, Mark Boal. They were in the midst of prepping the script when this historic incident occurred. The ending of their film will now incorporate the death of bin Laden. A case of life imitating art, or is it the other way round?

The as-yet-untitled screenplay has suddenly (and expectedly) been given a bump to the forefront. Bigelow had initially planned this as a small independent project but now several major studios have been showing an interest to turn this into a marquee film. No start date has been announced yet but insiders expect this to be fast-tracked into production very soon. I wonder how much of Osama we will get to see in this film, or whether he’ll just remain an off-screen presence until the end…