According to Deadline, Zac Efron is going to star in King Of The Jungle, a long-in-the-works movie about cybersecurity mogul-turned renegade recluse John McAfee (of McAfee Antivirus fame!). The movie is based on a Wired article, “John McAfee’s Last Stand,” and Efron will be playing a journalist who takes on a seemingly normal interview assignment and ends up stuck in McAfee’s “Colonel Kurtz-like compound” and has to deal with “escalating paranoia, slippery reality, and murder.” Deadline says a previous version of this movie would’ve starred Seth Rogen as the journalist and Michael Keaton as John McAfee, but we reported in 2017 that Johnny Depp had signed on to star as McAfee—which, in a purely tonal sense based on the kinds of rules he consistently takes on—would’ve made a whole lot of sense.
Casting for McAfee in this version of the movie hasn’t been announced, but it’ll probably go to some older white guy with weird energy. Maybe a… Michael Keaton or Johnny Depp-type? Or let’s just go fucking wild and have Zac Efron play both roles, that way it can be a metaphor for man’s capacity for paranoia and cybersecurity.