Steven Soderbergh, the “one for me, one for them” darling of Hollywood, is said to be in talks to produce (and maybe direct!) a film about the Panama Papers leak. The film will be based on Secrecy World, an upcoming book written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jake Bernstein.
The scandal involving the recent leak of the Panama Papers — 11.5 million documents that revealed the private legal and financial information of more than 214,488 offshore entities — is ripe for filmmaking, having revealed juicy, classified intel that could be spun in a lightheareded way, probably, to something like The Big Short. But it’s easy to imagine another kind of movie, drastically unlike that film, and it’s likely that Soderbergh’s take won’t be so comical, and will instead be a devastating look at the way privately wealthy individuals (Pedro Almodovar, Emma Watson) operate in a realm separate from the rest of our reality. One of the biggest resulting scandals from the leak was of course the resignation of Iceland’s Prime Minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, who had secretly transferred ownership of his shares of a private company to his wife shortly after entering politics in 2009. Amusingly and fittingly, the people of Iceland threw yogurt in the parliament as a means of expressing their anger. Still, we have no idea on which aspect this film will focus. It could even be the investigative process undertaken by the journalists who reported on the papers.
Aside from this film, Soderbergh has most recently directed the TV series The Knick, and is at work on Logan Lucky, which is a crime/caper that will star Riley Keough and Channing Tatum. No word yet on a release date for this new film or Logan.