Leonardo DiCaprio, a man who likes a fat To Do list, has attached himself to star in Deep Blue Goodbye, the planned adaptation of the first of John D. MacDonald's 21 Travis McGee novels. And yes, that smell in the air is the whiff of a potential franchise.
McGee, who first appeared in 1964, is a "salvage consultant" who lives on a beat-up house boat in Bahia Mar, Lauderdale and helps people to recover lost property in return for half its value. The Bond-esque character is something of a womaniser, and befriends a woman named Cathy Kerr who then asks him for help against a man called Junior Allen, a smiling psychopath and rapist who's trying to find a fortune brought back to Florida by a World War II soldier. Cue a race to the treasure, we're saying.
So far the only other name attached to the project is For The Love of the Game scriptwriter Dana Stevens, who's adapting the novel, but this seems a bit of a no-brainer. We could be looking at an old-school Bond / Into The Blue cross-over here, and in a time when Mad Men's the most talked-about thing on TV, somebody's gotta want to make that film.