One small part of the increasingly bizarre presidential election was Donald Trump‘s rambling thoughts on “the cyber” during the first presidential debate, when he declared, among other things, that “the security aspect of cyber is very, very tough” and that hackers “could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” And while nobody would expect Trump to be an expert about the online world, one wonders if he’s still logging in through AOL. That said, it mostly underscores the fact that there are many Americans whose knowledge of the internet world is cursory at best, and so trying to explain to them the realm of the deep web poses a particular challenge. But Joel and Ethan Coen are going to try and untangle that data.
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The sibling duo have been hired to write “Dark Web,” a thriller that’s in development over at 20th Century Fox. Initially set up with Dennis Lehane (“Gone Baby Gone,” “The Drop“) writing the script, the movie will be based on Wired‘s 2013 article about Ross William Ulbricht (aka Dread Pirate Roberts), who built the hidden online marketplace known as Silk Road where customers could order anything from drugs to contract killers, with Bitcoin used as the currency to complete transactions. However, Ulbricht soon became a target for the authorities, in a story with enough strange turns to make it, well, Coen-esque.
Whether or not this turns into something they’ll actually direct, we’ll have to wait and see, and as we’ve seen with “Unbroken” and “Bridge Of Spies,” just because the Coens write it doesn’t it mean they’ll helm. As for the genre of internet thrillers, let’s just say it’s a scattered category quality-wise, but few movies have matched the opening of Sandra Bullock‘s “The Net” and its terrifying vision into the future of pizza delivery. [THR]
