Kathryn Bigelow's 'Kill Bin Laden' has an ending

We already reported late last year that Kathryn Bigelow was working with The Hurt Locker screenwriter Mark Boal on a Black Ops project, before Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp thrust their high-profile Triple Frontier into a brighter spotlight. After last night’s dramatic news that Osama bin Laden had been killed and the details of the thrilling raid emerge today, Deadline says the special ops film is primed for a timely fast track. Just as Truman Capote held off completing In Cold Blood until after the murderers were executed, Bigelow and Boal’s screenplay, Kill Bin Laden, now has a climax that’s not open-ended.

Bigelow and Mark Boal, her collaborator on The Hurt Locker, have been mobilizing their film to go into production as their follow-up to that Best Picture Academy Award winner. Their movie as planned was based on an earlier unsuccessful mission to try to kill the Al Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 terrorist attack on America as he hid in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But now they’ve certainly got a celebratory ending to that dramatic story with tonight’s announcement that the U.S. conducted a military operation that killed Bin Laden. Mind you, reps for Bigelow have told me previously that this movie isn’t specifically about the Al Qaeda leader. A lot of details about this film are stilll sketchy and secret, but I’ve heard that Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle chief Larry Ellison, is ready to fund it. I heard as recently as Friday that Bigelow and Boal were courting Joel Edgerton [Animal Kingdom] for the lead actor.

Advance word of last night’s stunning announcement percolated through Twitter over an hour before Obama’s official press conference. An unexpected overnight celebrity, Sohaib Athar (@reallyvirtual) today says: “Uh oh, now I’m the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it.” Check out his real-time tweets after the cut.