According to The Hollywood Reporter, Paramount Pictures is in final negotiations to pre-emptively acquire Robert Ludlum's political thriller The Chancellor Manuscript as a star vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio. Michael Seitzman will write the adaptation, which will be produced by Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher's Red Wagon Entertainment,

DiCaprio's Appian Way and the Ludlum estate. The novel was published in 1977, though the big-screen version will be updated.

DiCaprio will play novelist Peter Chancellor, who is writing a thriller about Washington power brokers being blackmailed with information gathered by intelligence agencies in order to alter U.S. policy. When Chancellor's work of fiction turns out to have stumbled into reality, he ends up on a run for his life, becoming like a character from his own novel.