EXCLUSIVE: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been described at various times by powerful people in the U.S. government as a spy, a “tool of Russian intelligence,” and a “high-tech terrorist.”
But to filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, the proper terms for Assange are whistleblower, truth-seeker, and defender of the public’s right to know essential information about their government’s conduct. Jarecki’s Oscar-contending documentary The Six Billion Dollar Man: Julian Assange and the Price of Truth reevaluates the controversial figure whose website exposed shocking secrets, like the “Collateral Murder” video that showed U.S. military personnel in Iraq committing what can only be called war crimes.
The Six Billion Dollar Man opens in theaters in the UK and Ireland on December 19 and in U.S. theaters in early 2026. We have your first look at the film in the trailer above.
L-R director Eugene Jarecki, Kathleen Fournier, Julian Assange, Stella Assange and Jennifer Robinson pose during the ‘The Six Billion Dollar Man’ photocall at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 2025.
Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images
“When the film premiered at Cannes Film Festival this year where it won both the Grand Prize and a Golden Globe for Documentary, audiences were shaken up by revelations that will make you question everything you thought you already knew about the Assange case,” Jarecki said in a statement. “But now, times have changed so much and so rapidly, that audiences see the film as an urgent cautionary tale about what precisely is happening to all of us right now. We are now witnessing a war on journalism and a war on truth itself.”
The film features Julian Assange, his wife Stella Assange, an extraordinary interview with whistleblower Edward Snowden filmed in Moscow, Naomi Klein, Pamela Anderson, Alan Duncan, Daniel Ellsberg, Jen Robinson, Nils Melzer, Rafael Correa (former leader of Ecuador) and Sigurdur Thordarson. The Icelander Thordarson, known as “Siggi,” joined Wikileaks as a teenager but in the film emerges as one of Assange’s chief betrayers.
The Six Billion Dollar Man is being released by Watermelon Pictures. Producers are Kathleen Fournier and Eugene Jarecki; executive producers are James Packer, Addison O’Dea, and Mathilde Bonnefoy.
Jarecki will speak about his documentary on Sunday at Deadline’s Contenders Film: Documentary virtual event.
At Cannes, we interviewed Jarecki in the Deadline Studio on the Croisette. Previous documentaries, he noted, have been made about Assange and Wikileaks (by the likes of Oscar winners Laura Poitras and Alex Gibney), but his film is the first to track the resolution of the espionage case that at one point threatened Assange with a potential death penalty.
“What we witnessed is about 15 years of going after Julian Assange to bury him and his team and ultimately the U.S. government was willing to spend $6 billion to try to destroy him, which is what the film really reveals,” Jarecki explained in Cannes. “There was some very new evidence that came to light, came into our possession that we wanted to share with the public also.”
Julian Assange
Matthew Carey
Assange is now a free man, having struck a plea bargain with the American authorities that saw him plead guilty to one count of violating the U.S. Espionage Act. Seventeen other counts were dropped, and the U.S. sought no further prison time for him (Assange had spent over five years in prison in the UK on charges of violating bail conditions by seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London).
Watch the trailer for The Six Billion Dollar Man above.