First it was the New York Times’ spectacular tick-tock on the Deepwater Horizon explosion that got a movie option.

From Forbes.com:

BP Oil Spill: The Movie

Summit Entertainment, Participant Media and Imagenation Abu Dhabi, have announced that they’ve acquired the film rights to a 2010 New York Times article on the BP oil spill.

The dramatic 8,500-word essay tells the story of the events leading up to the explosive destruction of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig — and the crew on board responsible for its operation. “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hour” was published on Dec. 25 and written by David Barstow, David Rohde and Stephanie Saul.

Campaign Outsider Mortal Lock (pat. pending) for the next Hollywood Times option: Tuesday’s flood-the-zone The Death of Bin Laden section, with this tick-tock:

Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden

WASHINGTON — For years, the agonizing search for Osama bin Laden kept coming up empty. Then last July, Pakistanis working for the Central Intelligence Agency drove up behind a white Suzuki navigating the bustling streets near Peshawar, Pakistan, and wrote down the car’s license plate.

The man in the car was Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, and over the next month C.I.A. operatives would track him throughout central Pakistan. Ultimately, administration officials said, he led them to a sprawlingcompound at the end of a long dirt road and surrounded by tall security fences in a wealthy hamlet 35 miles from the Pakistani capital.

On a moonless night eight months later, 79 American commandos in four helicopters descended on the compound, the officials said. Shots rang out. A helicopter stalled and would not take off. Pakistani authorities, kept in the dark by their allies in Washington, scrambled forces as the American commandos rushed to finish their mission and leave before a confrontation. Of the five dead, one was a tall, bearded man with a bloodied face and a bullet in his head. A member of the Navy Seals snapped his picture with a camera and uploaded it to analysts who fed it into a facial recognition program.

And just like that, history’s most expansive, expensive and exasperating manhunt was over.

Cinematic enough? Here’s guessing Stephen Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino will think so.