Lance Armstrong gets the perfectly natural boost of big ratings and a J.J. Abrams movie about him

The second installment of Lance Armstrong’s EPO-enabled marathon confession to Oprah Winfrey has yet to air, but—given that most of the salient points of that confession have been leaked, in addition to being assumed for many, many years—already there’s talk of transforming its sort-of-revelations into a film whose ending you similarly already know. Deadline reports that Paramount is moving quickly to adapt Cycle Of Lies: The Fall Of Lance Armstrong, a book pitch made by New York Times sports reporter Juliet Macur, who’s been secretly harboring that pun for a decade now, just biding her time.

Fittingly for a story littered with misdirection and obfuscation that leads to an anticlimax, Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams will produce, clearly hoping that the 4.3 million viewers who tuned in to see Armstrong confirm his awfulness to Oprah will also be interested seeing a different sort of fake Lance Armstrong do that. As Deadline notes, this is the second Lance Armstrong movie to be developed in recent years, following one that would have starred Armstrong pal Jake Gyllenhaal in a story painting Armstrong as a hero who overcame adversity and unfair scrutiny to triumph over his many enemies. That movie will continue its successful, held-over midnight run in the theater of Lance Armstrong’s mind.