Steven Spielberg's Hollywood studio looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie after securing the screen rights to WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy, the book by Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding.
Reportedly conceived as an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President's Men, the film will be backed by DreamWorks – the studio founded in 1994 by Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
Leigh and Harding's book charts Julian Assange's life and times, from his itinerant childhood through to the creation of the WikiLeaks website in 2006. It also provides the inside story of Assange's explosive partnership with the Guardian and the release, last December, of more than 250,000 secret diplomatic cables.
Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of Guardian News & Media, said: "The Guardian's unique collaboration with WikiLeaks led to what some have described as one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years."
Discussing the proposed film, he added: "It's Woodward and Bernstein meets Stieg Larsson meets Jason Bourne. Plus the odd moment of sheer farce and, in Julian Assange, a compelling character who goes beyond what any Hollywood scriptwriter would dare to invent."
One joke circulating on the internet was that Leigh, Guardian investigations editor, could be played by No Country for Old Men star and supposed lookalike Javier Bardem. In addition to snapping up the Leigh/Harding bestseller, DreamWorks has secured rights to Inside WikiLeaks, by Assange's former colleague Daniel Domscheit-Berg. This has led insiders to speculate that DreamWorks executives are planning a heavily fictionalised thriller.
"A good template for what they are thinking is The Social Network, where Aaron Sorkin not only used the Ben Mezrich book The Accidental Billionaires as a resource, but gathered actual testimony from the lawsuits filed against Mark Zuckerberg that detailed the formation of Facebook and provided high drama," said Mike Fleming of the industry website Deadline Hollywood.
The picture is the most prominent of a number of WikiLeaks movies at various stages of development. These include a documentary by award-winning film-maker Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and a mooted biopic based on a New Yorker article by Raffi Khatchadourian, co-produced by HBO and the BBC.
The embryonic DreamWorks version still requires a scriptwriter, a director and a cast. It may also need an ending. Reviled by his foes as a "high-tech terrorist", Assange is currently fighting an extradition order to Sweden to face sexual abuse accusations.
This week he reportedly lashed out at his former collaborators at the Guardian, who, according to Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, he accused of being part of a "Jewish conspiracy" against him. Assange has denied this allegation. There seems little doubt that Assange's life story provides enough red meat for dramatists. But the final act has surely yet to be written.
• This article was amended on 3 March 2011. The original said: "Steven Spielberg looks set to oversee WikiLeaks: the Movie". This has now been corrected
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