"The studio would not confirm this, but it seemed intriguing and dishy enough to discuss," says Deadline who we guess are feeling a bit saucy this afternoon, and hell we'll play along with that. Benedict Cumberbatch as the one of the most infamous men and political figures on the planet right now? Yeah, we'd like to see that.
Just to rewind, earlier this summer Bill Condon and Jeremy Renner were being tossed around as potential director and star in the movie DreamWorks has been developing about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for a while now. And while Renner looks to be out, Cumberbatch has stepped in as a possibility for the hacker/leaker, with Joel Kinnaman potentially as his former right right hand man, Daniel Domscheit-Berg. He's the guy who wrote "Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website" which the studio picked up the rights to in the spring of 2011. At the same time they nabbed "WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy" written by journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding, who recount their dealings with Assange as they worked with him on the publication of a couple of the big document dumps that made waves last year. And both books served as the source for the screenplay by Josh Singer ("The West Wing," "Fringe").
But nothing is confirmed at the moment, but both of these guys are definitely on the rise, with "Sherlock" star featuring in the upcoming "The Hobbit" movies as Smaug and in "Star Trek Into Darkness" as the still myterious villain. Meanwhile, Kinnaman will be dispensing justice next summer as "RoboCop." A team up with them directed by the newly liberated from the "Twilight" franchise, Bill Condon? Sure we'd be interested, but the movie is walking a tight line. The Assange saga is still not over, though as the Aussie movie "Underground" showed (read our TIFF review here), you can still tell a compelling story even by zeroing in on a specific moment in his life. And it seems this one is poised to tell of his split from his former right hand man. And while the material lends itself to swinging wildly in either direction, painting him as a hero or terrorist, we just hope we can get a balanced portrait on screen.
