Joel and Ethan Coen are to team up for Fox thriller film Dark Web, which was previously titled Silk Road and will tell the true story of Ross William Ulbricht, who worked under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts and is infamous for building an illegal online drug marketplace called The Silk Road.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the siblings’ screenplay will be based on a 2015 Wired magazine article by Joshuah Bearman about the rise and fall of Ulbricht. The 32-year-old former Darknet market operator was convicted of money laundering, computer hacking, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics in February 2015.
Ulbricht is currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. He was arrested in October 2013 and the FBI accused him of being the “mastermind” behind the Silk Road.
To prevent him deleting files or important data prior to his arrest, the two agents pretended to be lovers having an argument until he was distracted and one of them put a USB stick into his laptop and cloned his hard drive.
The Darknet is a hidden part of the internet which can only be accessed with specific software. Its uses include computer hacking and file corruption, as well as the sale of restricted goods on special Darknet markets.
The Coen brothers recently wrote Hail, Caesar!, Unbroken and the forthcoming George Clooney-directed movie Suburbicon.
