If Robert Ludlum could reap royalties beyond the grave, he’d probably be the richest writer in the afterlife. One by one, Ludlum’s unadapted novels (of which there are 25 left) are making the glorious transfer to the big screen with some big names attached to them.

In a seeming response to MGM‘s Tuesday announcement that Tom Cruise has signed on for the author’s The Matarese Circle (and possibly a sequel), Universal, who owns the rights to the remainder of the ‘Ludlum library,’ is fast-tracking an adaptation of Ludlum’s 1982 Cold War-centric thriller, The Parsifal Mosaic.

Similar to The Bourne Identity series, Parsifal is about a U.S. espionage agent, Michael Havelock, who becomes tangled in a KGB-backed conspiracy that leads him to a tumultuous search for Parsifal, a shady character running a blackmail scheme that could lead to nuclear war among the U.S., China and the Soviets.

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The king of conspiracy rumors himself, Tom Cruise, is confirmed to partner with Denzel Washington in MGM‘s The Matarese Circle, a thriller in which the two stars play spies teaming up against a global conspiracy (Sorry folks, not referring to Scientology here, although that would be some truly ironic casting).

David Cronenberg directs this adaptation of the 1979 novel by Robert Ludlum‘s (who also wrote “The Bourne Identity” series) with a purported contemporary twist on the author’s original Cold War setting. Cruise and Washington are cast as two prideful spies who spend decades as archenemies trying to kill each other and ultimately team up against the Matarese, a conspiracy group behind global instability [Variety].

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