Warner Bros. has been looking to make a film based on the stranger-than-fiction story of McAfee Antivirus software company founder John McAfee for a few years now. In 2013 when news of the movie first emerged, we suggested Johnny Depp for the lead in a feature about tech biopics, and whaddya know? Depp is now aboard King Of The Jungle.
Focus directing duo Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have been attached to oversee the movie, since the original story broke, and it will now have a script by biopic regulars Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski based on Joshua Davis' Wired article John McAfee's Last Stand.
The film will chronicle how, in a blend of both canny market awareness and luck, McAfee’s product arrived as the need for virus software blew up like Violet Beauregarde in Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. After making a fortune hunting down and removing trojans, worms and nasty invaders, McAfee cashed out of McAfee Associates and moved to Belize to start working on other start-ups. That’s when things went a little haywire. After the local gang suppression unit raided his property, it was discovered that he’d been busy pulling a Heisenberg – or for non-Breaking Bad fans, manufacturing unlicensed drugs. And it seems that earning all that money had simply increased his innate paranoia and wayward tendencies. He was living the girls & guns high life, but had forgotten the legal ramifications.
Increasing the confusion was the fact that fellow US expatriate Gregory Viant Faull was found dead of a gunshot wound, a crime for which McAfee was hauled in as a person of interest, though no one was charged. McAfee fled Belize for Guatemala, pleaded for asylum, faked a heart attack and was eventually deported back to the US in December 2012.
IMR is handling the foreign rights to the film at Cannes, and this one will be in active development. Depp's back on our screens on the 26th of this month in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge.