With Ben Affleck busy gathering actors for real-life hostage rescue tale Argo, it would seem that fact-based prisoner stories are all the rage in Hollywood at the moment. Warner Bros. is no doubt looking to combine that wave with the recent blitz of information about Special Forces teams in the wake of Osama Bin Laden’s death by shoving The Mission on to the fast track and trying to nab both David O. Russell and Brad Pitt for the film.
No, this isn't a film about Jesuit priests in South America. The plot will follow the carefully crafted Operation Jaque, a mission that saw several governments, covert organisations, diplomats and military units working together across six years to free 15 hostages from the Colombian jungles.
Guerrilla group FARC were behind the captures, holding a group including former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans against their will for years, moving their position constantly to stop them being tracked down and chaining the prisoners to trees by their necks at night.
There’s no sign yet of whether Pitt will actually end up involved, since A) he’s pretty much offered everything going anyway and B) he’s at work now on World War Z. As for David O. Russell, he’s got The Silver Linings Playbook all but set as his next film and Old St Louis vying for his attention, along with Disney’s Maleficent. Plus he’s gotten a reputation recently for picking up and then dropping out of projects (coughUnchartedcough). But since he is already loosely attached to the Colombian pic as a producer, there’s a chance he’ll get involved.
As of right now, Warners has a Mission script in hand from Trade writer Peter Landesman and producing power in the shape of Lorenzo di Bonaventura and regular Steven Soderbergh collaborator Scott Z Burns. So we’re guessing this is one that will get moving fairly quickly no matter who ends up on either side of the camera…