Brett Ratner and Warner Bros bought the film rights to Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

The director of landmark films like Hercules, Movie 43, and Rush Hour has just scored a major coup. Brett Ratner has landed the film rights to Donna Tartt‘s smash hit, Pulitzer-winning doorstopper, The Goldfinch. Deadline was the first to report the deal.

RatPac Entertainment has joined Warner Bros in the pursuit of movie rights to Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller The Goldfinch. They finally closed the deal today for a film that will be produced by Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson of Color Force, along with RatPac’s Brett Ratner, whose Hercules opened Friday. James Packer will be executive producer.

Warner Bros also owns the rights to Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, but no film has been produced yet. The slow pace of that project’s development is being blamed for the drawn-out process of getting The Goldfinch deal done. For clues as to how Warner Bros and Ratner might approach a prestige project like this,  The Seattle Times‘ Moira Macdonald dug up an interview she did with Christopher Hampton, who had been hired to adapt The Secret History, before moving on to adapt Atonement.

One of the projects I most regret . . . I did an adaptation of Donna Tartt’s book, The Secret History, a marvelous book and very cinematic. There was a moment where [the producers] said, well, the hero’s too passive. I said, that’s what the book’s about. They said well, we can’t make a film with a passive hero.

So, maybe not so promising for Theo Decker, but the future looks bright for whatever actor winds up playing Boris. Back in March, Edan Lepucki and Janet Potter cast the hypothetical film for The Millions: check it out here.