Paramount Pictures has preemptively picked up "Lost City of Z," David Grann's manuscript about the search for a lost city in the Amazon reports Variety.

Brad Pitt will produce the feature adaptation through his Plan B company as a potential starring vehicle.

Grann's forthcoming nonfiction book concerns British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who was attempting to find the so-called City of Z when he and his party disappeared in 1925.

Over the next 70 years, scores of explorers tried and failed to retrace Fawcett's path, including a 1996 expedition of Brazilian adventurers. Pitt would play Fawcett.

The manuscript is scheduled to be published in February. The studio previously optioned Grann's New Yorker article "City of Water."