Robert Littell’s spy novel The Amateur might have already hit the screen way back in 1981, but that’s no bar to Fox 2000’s plan to update the plot and create a new version.
Especially when Hugh Jackman and his production company are involved, with Jackman looking to play the lead.
24 writer Evan Katz has been hired to take Littell’s basic plot – a CIA code-cracker hunts down the bad guys (Cold War Eastern Bloc types in the book, post-9/11 terrorists in the new script) who killed his fiancée when they downed her plane. But our hero is not your typical gung-ho agent. He has to “persuade” (i.e. blackmail) his bosses into supplying the necessary training to make him a killing machine.
If Katz cracks the screenplay, expect it to go into production as soon as Jackman finds a spare couple of months in an already loaded schedule. Say… 2009?