According to The Hollywood Reporter, Summit Entertainment snapped up the feature film rights to the book, "The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero."

The biography was written by William Kalush and Larry Sloman.

Published in 2006 from Atria Books, the book postulated that Harry Houdini was really a spy for Britain and was also asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II's court in prerevolutionary Russia. In addition to this, the book "portrayed the master escape artist and magician as a debunker of con artists who pretended to be spiritualists, leading to the controversial theory that Houdini's death was caused by the spiritual movement as payback."

The plan is for Summit to make this story as an action film and maybe even turn it into a franchise. There is currently no screenwriter attached to the project.