The Weinstein Company bought the rights to Jeff Abbott's Panic just about the time it was published last summer, but it's only just now worked its way to the top of their to-be-made pile. The book is an incredibly Alias-esque thriller about Evan Casher, a young documentarian with a hot girlfriend and a promising career. Everything is going well until he goes to visit his mother and finds her murdered, and is nearly killed himself. It turns out - here comes the Alias part - that his entire life has been a lie, and that both of his parents (dad's missing) were secret agents of some sort. In order to stay alive, he apparently undergoes some sort of only-in-the-movies (and novels) transformation from film nerd to super-agent; it's a role that's obviously crying out for Matt Damon.

The screenplay is currently being written by Richard Regen, whose only IMDB credit is as an executive producer on the Barry Sonnenfeld TV show Secret Agent Man (hey, at least he's got some background with the subject matter), and The Matador's Richard Shepard has been tapped to direct. According to Shepard, the movie will be "a very stylish 1970s-type paranoid action thriller...Something that's smart and visually inventive." While that sounds quite tasty, I think I once heard someone say exactly the same thing about Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, so it's probably best to just wait and see.