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Following their work collectively on David O. Russell’s 2013 Greatest Image-nominated crime comedy American Hustle, Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale are in talks to reteam on Better of Enemies, a brand new movie based mostly on the e book Better of Enemies: The Final Nice Spy Story of the Chilly Warfare by Eric Dezenhall and Gus Russo.
American Hustle‘s Eric Warren Singer is aboard to script the pic, with Atlas Leisure‘s Charles Roven (Oppenheimer) aboard to provide. Whereas Netflix and Apple have been reported as main the chase for the package deal, Deadline understands that it’s nonetheless in play with the total array of studios and streamers. There’s no phrase but on who will direct the pic, however we hear there’s a risk that Cooper might step behind the digital camera right here following his work on the main awards contender Maestro.
Revealed by Hachette imprint Twelve in 2018, Better of Enemies tells the story of CIA agent Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko, a pair of Chilly Warfare spies who developed an unlikely friendship at a time when they need to have been something however. Platt and Vasilenko have been new entrants to the Washington, D.C. intelligence scene again in 1978, with the previous understanding of the CIA’s counterintelligence workplace and the latter, out of the Soviet Embassy. Remarkably, they got here to ascertain robust private ties, even after every was despatched to seduce the opposite into betraying their nation.
The pair have been concerned with fixing among the most well-known spy tales of the twentieth century, together with the rooting out of Soviet mole Robert Hanssen. Whereas Vasilenko spent a while in a Soviet jail after it got here to the federal government’s consideration that he’d been working as a double agent for the U.S., he was finally freed with assist from the CIA through the Spy Swap of 2010. Amongst different advocates throughout his interval of incarceration was none aside from American Hustle‘s Robert De Niro.
Sources say Cooper will play Platt, with Bale as Vasilenko.
Cooper is coming off writing, directing, producing and starring in Maestro, an acclaimed Netflix drama surrounding the complicated relationship between famed composer Leonard Bernstein and his spouse Felicia Montealegre, which hit theaters in restricted launch final month and debuts on the streamer on December twentieth.
Lately lending his voice to the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, Bale was beforehand seen in movies together with Netflix’s Edgar Allan Poe pic The Pale Blue Eye, David O. Russell’s Amsterdam, and Thor: Love and Thunder.
Coming off of the large success of Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-contending historic epic Oppenheimer, which grossed over $950M worldwide in theaters, Roven additionally has on his dance card James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy, which bows in theaters in 2025.
At this time’s Better of Enemies information was first reported by Insneider.
