This film rather singularly looks back on Julian Assange’s rebellious teenage years as a hacker.

Really? The first Assange movie out of the gate and it deals only with the time before he was powerful, important, or interesting?

Way to go, Underground: The Julian Assange Story. If I wanted to see obnoxious Swedish teenagers, I’d hang out at the nearby youth hostel more than I already do.

Points to the casting agent who noticed the similarities. Both Jeremy Renner and Julian Assange enjoy faces that could be described as “squishy,” so the other considerations are rendered moot by this squishiness.

It’s been over a year since we were hit with a deluge of Wikileaks-based projects, none of which have come to fruition, leaving us to wonder if anyone, anywhere even cares about Wikileaks anymore.

The scandal of Julian Assange, the Internet rebel who some claimed created international transparency, and others claimed performed thousands of acts of treason, has since died down, but that could just mean we’re no longer sick of the story, so maybe we’re ready for a movie.

Glass is half-full, right?

Apparently the turn is Renner’s idea, who presumably wants to play a different type of wanted man after The Bourne Legacy.

HBO Films has attached Ferguson to direct their Julian Assange movie, currently in development. The documentarian will try his hand at directing a movie with actors, scripts and all that crazy stuff for the first time. There’s no writer yet, but the story tells the tale of Assange and his hench-leakers getting ready to post a secret half-hour vide taken inside an Army helicopter onto the interwebs. Hopefully they will not make the classic mistake of putting an awesome soundtrack on the video, and having it pulled by YouTube for copyright violations.

This co-production with the BBC is one of many, many WikiLeaks movies in development by various parties, including Dreamworks and Paul Greengrass. Maybe after he’s done with this, Ferguson could also direct one of the many Snow White movies in development too. Leak two birds with one stone. (Deadline)

The parade of Assange movies keeps on marchin’ with Dreamworks snatching up two books written by people close to the phenomenon. They scored both Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website, and WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. Why do they need two books to tell Assange’s story? They don’t. My guess is that they didn’t want anyone else to them.

Deadline seems to think that the film will take cues from not only the books, but lawsuit transcripts and other media as well, a l The Social Network. However, the one source they won’t have at their disposal is Assange’s memoir, which is currently being shopped by CAA.

Rather than have the myriad projects all compete against each other, why don’t the studios form a synergy and establish some off-month, like September and make it “Assange Month?” I mean, who wouldn’t wan to see nine Julian Assange features in one month?

The first is a movie based on a recent New York Times Magazine article entitled “The Boy Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest” (timely!) which screenwriter Mark Boal is involved in. It isn’t known whether Boal will actually be writing the movie – this seems somewhat unlikely since he’s got those two movies with Kathryn Bigelow already, but if Assange can have 18 movies about him, why can’t Boal write 3 or 4 in a year?

The second is a movie based on the recent  book Inside Wikileaks, which was written by the Assange’s former second-in-command. It may or may not feature scenes of Julian Assange drunkenly beating his underlings with a wire coat hanger.

And finally, there is some interest in a movie based on Assange’s memoirs, which reportedly Paul Greengrass is interested in directing. I can’t wait to see the shaky footage of Assange updating his OKCupid profile. (via SlashFilm)

Seeing a major studio jump on any type of documentary is rare, so Universal must believe that something special is going to happen here, either with the production of the movie, or with the public’s interest in the real-life story. Perhaps they picked it up anticipating or having obtained access to the man himself, whose got some legal bills to pay and could use the cash.

This doc will almost certainly beat the aforementioned biopic to theaters, but no date has been announced yet. Gibney has made a name for himself by directing docs on Enron, Eliot Spitzer, Jack Abramoff, Hunter S. Thompson, Guantanamo Bay, so it’s no surprise that he got the call for one of the most compelling sagas of 2010-2011. Even money says Assange sounds just like Hans Gruber from Die Hard. (Playlist)