Hollywood sure loves making films based on the real life tales of America’s “War on Drugs.” Universal has greenlit another pic about the hunt for a notorious drug kingpin. This time, it’ll be about Joaquín Guzmán Loera, who rose up the ranks to become the head of the Sinaloa cartel. They’ve hired Craig Borten, hot off his Academy Award nomination for last year’s Dallas Buyers Club, to write the script- which will be based off of a Patrick Keefe article for the New Yorker.

The film will share that article’s title, Hunt for El Chapo, and Universal has tapped Peter Berg to sit in the director’s chair. Perg was recently in the news for another project, as the director is awfully busy lately. That other film I’m referring to is The Six Billion Dollar Man, which Berg will direct with Mark Wahlberg starring. The Lone Survivor director will likely bring violent grit to Guzmán’s tale.

Guzmán’s life story does have the trappings of a Hollywood saga.There’s his rise to power as he worked his way up through Mexican cartels throughout the 1970s and 1980s. There was a big prison break in 2011, where he used his vast network of contacts and influence to break out of a maximum security facility, and his subsequent return to prison earlier this year.

SOURCE: Deadline