Warner Bros. Options Film Rights to Satori by Don Winslow

Warner Bros. has optioned the film rights to crime novelist Don Winslow's 2011 bestseller Satori. Winslow will co-write the adapted screenplay with Shane Salerno, who co-wrote the adapted screenplay for another of Winslow's books, Savages.

The lead character in the book, Nicholai Hel — genius, mystic, and the perfect, formidable assassin — is expected to be played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

It is the fall of 1951, and the Korean War is raging. Twenty-six-year-old Hel has spent the last three years in solitary confinement at the hands of the Americans. Hel is a master of hoda korosu, or "naked kill", is fluent in seven languages, and has honed extraordinary "proximity sense" — an extra-awareness of the presence of danger. He has the skills to be the world's most fearsome assassin and now the CIA needs him.

The Americans offer Hel freedom, money, and a neutral passport in exchange for one small service: to go to Beijing and kill the Soviet Union's commissioner to China. It's almost certainly a suicide mission, but Hel accepts. Now he must survive chaos, violence, suspicion, and betrayal while trying to achieve his ultimate goal of satori — the possibility of true understanding and harmony with the world.

(Source: Deadline|Hollywood.)