THE ATLANTIC: At latest count, at least four studios are working on at least five movies about the WikiLeaks story. And with Assange somewhat out of pocket while on house arrest, plenty of option deals are going to journalists who are covering the secretive organization.
- Guardian reporters David Leigh and Luke Harding sold rights to their book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy to DreamWorks
- Raffi Khatchadourian embedded with Assange for a New Yorker profile and sold rights to his HBO and the BBC which will release a documentary by Inside Job director and Oscar winner Charles Ferguson.
- Bill Keller sold his life rights to a production company led by another Oscar winner, Mark Boal, writer/producer of Hurt Locker, after he wrote about his dealings with Assange.
Along with those four projects, Universal Pictures will release a documentary by Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (and brother of The Atlantic‘s staff editor James Gibney). MORE