Although the book sold 250,000 copies, Leckie kept his day job. But one copy ended up on a resort bookshelf in the Maldive Islands, where it happened to be picked up by a bored Vin Diesel, the U.S. action-movie star. Entranced, Diesel read Hannibal in one sitting.
Now, in a Tinseltown fantasy-come-true, Leckie finds himself with a movie deal: Diesel has helped secure the film rights to Hannibal, enlisted Revolution Studios -- which produced Gladiator -- and brought in famed Black Hawk Down director Ridley Scott. Currently in preproduction, Hannibal the Conqueror is to star Diesel in a story based (roughly) on the man who spent his whole life fighting the Romans. Early reports put the budget at a staggering $200 million, which would make it the most expensive motion picture in history. The 45-year-old Leckie, a classics scholar who once taught ancient history at Oxford, stands to earn $1 million plus 1 percent of the film’s net. (Canongate paid him just £5,000 [$7,874] for the book.) Leckie is determined not to let his surprise success go to his head. “As the Roman poet Ovid put it,” he says, “good fortune is a fickle mistress -- she often smiles before she bites.”
