Mike Newell Helming Litvinenko Project?

I’m still in awe of and can imagine a film version of yesterday’s news item where a team of assassins played dress up, staked out a swanky hotel and took out a leader of the Hamas…if that headliner has got me thinking of a better version of Munich, then I have every reason to believe that despite not knowing the film’s true villain, that Alexander Litvinenko’s true life story might translate well on screen with the Cold War, spy vs spy elements. Word is, we won’t be seeing Paul Greengrass or Kevin MacDonald taking the reins of this studio project, instead Mike Newell and David Scarpa from The Day the Earth Stood Still are on board and the project is being developed by Warner Bros. The Guardian reports that this twosome are on tap and that there won’t be a conflict of “Litvinenko” projects as the one announced by Columbia Pictures (Michael Mann was once attached to direct Death Of A Dissident: The Poisoning Of Alexander Litvinenko And The Return Of The KGB” co-written by Litvinenko’s widow Marina) is a no-go.

Currently with Johnny Depp attached, this is based book on Alan Cowell’s The Terminal Spy, which is described as “the definitive story of the assassination and of the profound international implications of this first act of nuclear terrorism”. It claims to trace the path of the polonium from Russia’s closed nuclear cities through Moscow and Hamburg to the Millennium Hotel in central London where the substance may have been slipped into Litvinenko’s tea. A postmortem found that he died as the result of imbibing a tiny amount of the poisonous radioactive isotope polonium-210, but attempts by British authorities to extradite a Russian national thought to be responsible for the killing, Andrei Lugovoi, were thwarted by Moscow.

Do you think that Newell is/or could be the right man for the job?