Will the death of Osama Bin Laden kill Kathryn Bigelow’s upcoming thriller?

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, last night President Barack Obama announced that US Special Forces succeeded this weekend in finding, and ultimately killing, Osama Bin Laden. I don’t believe anyone is naive enough to think this is the end of terrorism or a harbinger of world peace but it’s a great moment of triumph, however fleeting, for many of the families who are still impacted by the events of September 11th.

While I’ll let the New York Times contemplate what the death of Bin Laden means to international relations, terrorism and politics, there was a film in development in Hollywood based around the hunt of Osama Bin Laden and there’s some debate about whether than film can or will still happen.

Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow had been planning an action-thriller tentatively titled KILL BIN LADEN that Michael Fassbender and Joel Edgerton had been in talks to star. It seems as if both actors have moved on from the project and it’s unclear if the project will still go ahead as currently planned.

[UPDATE: Variety is reporting that Bigelow and writer Mark Boal are still moving ahead with the project as their script was following the exact same kill team that took out Bin Laden. The script will be rewritten in the weeks ahead to include this weekend’s raid on Pakistan with hopes that filming can begin this summer and be the first Bin Laden project out of the gate.]

It’s likely Bigelow will focus on TRIPLE FRONTIER, a project that has Tom Hanks attached to star, while she and writer Mark Boal figure out what to do with their BIN LADEN film. They could either change the ending to include the death of Bin Laden or rewrite the script to follow the real-life events of Sunday.

Both Bigelow and Boal are expected to be meeting this week to discuss the future of the project and how they’ll proceed. Boal, a former investigative journalist, would I’m sure love to get his hands into the real story. What do you think they should do with their film?