JJ Abrams plans Diamond Heist

Uber producer and "can do no wrong" man JJ Abrams is hooking up again with Paramount for a caper flick based on a real life $100M diamond heist.

Paramount Pictures has purchased film rights to the Wired magazine article "The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist," by Joshua Davis. Writer-producer-director Abrams, through his Bad Robot shingle, will take on the project as a producer and, potentially, as a director.

The article, which will be published in the April issue of Wired, describes the true story of an unprecedented diamond heist in Antwerp, Belgium, and the crew that pulled it off. In early 2003, a small group of Italian thieves miraculously circumvented 10 layers of security to access a vault beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and make off with a purported $100 million in diamonds, gold and jewelry (the actual value is still a mystery).

Over six years, Davis scored a series of interviews with the ringleader, incarcerated in a Belgian prison, who finally divulged, in French, just how it was done. Davis acquired the subject's life rights in the process.

This sounds failry awesome to me and I am glad to hear JJ is considering directing, I love heist movies but they are very difficult to pull off well. This one seems to have some very intriguing elements to it that should provide the platform for a decent thriller if mined right, the question is if JJ will use an authentric international cast or not.