Deadline Hollywood reported today that Raius-TWC acquired the North American rights for the Pablo Escobar film Paradise Lost for $2 million. The film is directed by Andrea Di Stefano and costars Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games), Brady Corbet, and Claudia Traisac, with Oscar-winner Benicio Del Toro in the role of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. The story follows a young man who visits Columbia and falls for and marries a local girl, only to discover he has married the kingpin’s niece, whose uncle then begins to lure him into the family business. The film is produced by Dimitri Rassam and Romain Le Grand, with Pathe and Frederique Dumas of Orange Studio, as Miquel Angel Faura from Roxbury and uMedia. The film is expected to be released later this year. As you may know, Hollywood studios have been attempting to get a film chronicling the life of Pablo Escobar for several years now, with titles including The Ballad of Pablo Escobar. Beneicio Del Toro was once involved with a similar project, and actors like John Lequizamo and directors like Brad Furman have at different points been attached to various projects regarding the cartel leader, but until now, nothing had gained enough speed to get from the production stage to the big screen. A fun spin on the situation was taken in the HBO series Entourage, where fictional actor Vince Chase took on the role of Escobar in an independent picture called Medellin, which was accepted for showing at the Cannes Film Festival only to receive terrible reviews and being released straight to DVD. Paradise Lost takes the name from the famous 12-book poem by John Milton, which was published in 1667 and covers such matters as the War in Heaven, and the temptations of Lucifer on Adam and Eve. I’m not sure whether the filmmakers meant to make this connection or not, intentionally using the character of Satan in the original poem as an analogy for Escobar himself, but I guess we’ll see sometime soon. Hopefully this movie is worth the wait; if it stays true to the depths of Escobar’s character and the violence-fueled world that he was a part of and doesn’t focus too heavily on the supporting love story, it should be a pretty good movie, especially with Benicio Del Toro appearing as Escobar.