Don Winslow once wrote a best-selling book about an American boy raised in Japan under the tutelage of a martial arts expert. The book was called Satori, and now Warner Bros. have bought the rights for it, with a view to getting Leonardo DiCaprio to play the lead.
A prequel to the '70s classic thriller novel, Shibumi, **Satori **is set in the 1950s, the boy (called Nicholaï Hel, by the way) is put in prison after he is convicted of the mercy killing of his stepfather.
The CIA offer him a way out of jail, however, as long as he kills the Soviet commissioner to China... if he doesn't, he's back in the slammer. Now if that isn't the plot of a good thriller, we don't know what is.
Other Winslow novels have already caught the eye of the big studios, with Oliver Stone shooting Savages, starring Aaron Johnson, Benicio del Toro, John Travolta, Salma Hayek and Blake Lively, amongst others.
It seems that Warner Bros. are after another** Bourne**, and Leo is the man willing to step into those blood-splattered shoes. From what we've read of the book, it seems like a good shout as potential action franchise, but without a director locked in, it's difficult to make any assumptions about what the Satori film might be like.
There is no ear-marked release date for Satori, since that would be horrendously premature.