Days after it was announced that Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale will reunite on film for the Cold War thriller Best of Enemies, Deadline reports Amazon MGM Studios has won a bidding war for the film and will give it a theatrical release.
Best of Enemies tells the story of Cold War spies Jack Platt for the CIA and Gennady Vasilenko for the KGB. Cooper will play Platt and Bale will star as Vasilenko in an adaptation of the non-fiction book Best of Enemies: The Last Great Spy Story of the Cold War by Eric Dezenhall and Gus Russo.
The film will be written by Eric Warren Singer and produced by Charles Roven in a move that reunites all four of them after they worked together on the 2013 film American Hustle. A director is not yet attached, but Cooper may very well direct the film himself after helming A Star is Born and Maestro, the latter of which had a limited theatrical release and will premiere on Netflix December 20th with several positive reviews from audiences and critics, making it a strong awards contender (read our review here).
Best of Enemies “tells the story of CIA agent Jack Platt and KGB agent Gennady Vasilenko, a pair of Cold War spies who developed an unlikely friendship at a time when they should have been anything but. Platt and Vasilenko were new entrants to the Washington, D.C., intelligence scene in 1978, with the former working out of the CIA’s counterintelligence office and the latter out of the Soviet Embassy.
“The pair were involved with solving some of the most famous spy stories of the 20th century, including the rooting out of Soviet mole Robert Hanssen. While Vasilenko spent some time in a Soviet prison after it came to the government’s attention that he’d been working as a double agent for the U.S., he was ultimately freed with help from the CIA during the Spy Swap of 2010.”
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