Back in March it was announced that Summit Entertainment had secured the rights to the book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero and that they planned to bring it to the big screen. Summit’s plans are to make the movie an “action-thriller” with the Houdini character being “part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes.”

The book, written by William Kalush and Larry Sloman, implied that Houdini “acted as a spy for Britain and was asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II’s court in pre-revolutionary Russia” and that he was a “debunker” of spiritual conmen who claimed that they could talk to the dead.

This looks to be the direction that they are going as Summit has hired Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Catch Me If You Can writer Jeff Nathanson to script the Houdini film.