Listen all of y'all... With an eye on his post-Transformers future, and with the bizarro Pain And Gain still in recent memory, Michael Bay has picked up the rights to a new project: a World War II action thriller about a mission to destroy a secret Nazi weapon. He is, in point of fact, scheming on a thing that's Sabotage.
In a sense, the project is a new version of Anthony Mann's The Heroes Of Telemark, telling the story of the Norwegian Resistance mission to destroy the Vemork Norsk Hydro plant, where the Nazis were producing heavy water with the potential to manufacture an atomic bomb.
Specifically, this version is based on an as-yet unwritten new book on the subject by popular historian Neal Bascomb. Bascomb has previously published books on the hunt for Adolf Eichmann and the Battleship Potempkin mutiny. The full title for his Telemark pitch is Sabotage: A Genius Scientist, His Band of Young Commandos, and the Mission to Kill Hitler's Super Bomb. That alone was enough to spark a bidding war for the movie option, which was won by Paramount.
Aside from Mann's film, the story of a crack squad sent on an apparent suicide mission to destroy a mega-weapon up an inaccessible cliff also has obvious parallels with the classic Guns Of Navarone. As an action adventure though - involving "parachutes, skis, tommy guns and explosives" in an arctic landscape - it sounds like the perfect opportunity for Bayhem.
At this stage, Bay is only attached to produce and develop, but while his crystal ball ain't so crystal clear, it's sounding likely that he'll also direct when the time comes.