Hollywood Studios Battle to Make Litvinenko Film

It has all of the ingredients of a Hollywood blockbuster: a mysterious and gruesome death by poisoning, several shadowy ex-spies, plenty of political intrigue - and a London sushi bar.

In fact, no fewer than three Hollywood studios are bidding to make a film about the life and death of Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian dissident killed last November by a dose of polonium.

Scotland Yard may not yet have uncovered Litvinenko's killers, who appear to have slipped the radioactive substance into his tea during a meeting on November 1. But this has not deterred Warner Bros and the actor Johnny Depp from snapping up film rights to a forthcoming book about Litvinenko's murder.

At the same time, Colombia Pictures and the director Michael Mann have paid $1.5m (£760,000) for the rights to another book being written by Litvinenko's widow, Marina, and friend Alex Goldfarb, the magazine Variety said. Their book is expected to appear in May, it added.

Both studios are up against Braun Entertainment. Last weekend the group announced it had bought the rights to Litvinenko's own book, published in 2004, in which he accuses Russia's intelligence service, the FSB, of blowing up Moscow apartment blocks then blaming the carnage on Chechen separatists.

Yesterday Alan Cowell, a London-based journalist whose book on Litvinenko has been bought by Warner Bros, said the interest was hardly surprising. "The fact remains that a British citizen was poisoned in a fairly ghastly way in the centre of London, 100 yards away from the US embassy," he said. "It's a very dramatic and compelling story. Obviously Litvinenko was a complicated and complex person. Playing him will be a challenge for any actor. This guy is not a cardboard cutout of a KGB heavy."

Warner Bros purchased Cowell's book for Depp's production company. Depp would produce the film and could star in it, Variety said. Russian newspapers speculated that James Bond actor Daniel Craig could also play the dissident.

This week, Russian prosecutors said Scotland Yard planned to return to Moscow after a seemingly fruitless trip last year. Russian officials have suggested Litvinenko's murder was the work of dissidents keen to discredit the Kremlin.