Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, has optioned the movie rights to Ben Mezrich's "Ugly Americans" and "Q" says The Boston Globe.

Mezrich penned "Bringing Down The House", the book which served as the basis of the Dana Brunetti and Kevin Spacey-produced "21" which opened in March.

'Americans' follows the young, brilliant, and hypercompetitive traders who manipulated loopholes in an outdated and inefficient Asian financial system to rake in millions and nearly bankrupting the Japanese economy in the process.

'Q' is based on actual but little-known draconian quarantine laws in the US.

Brunetti and Spacey will also produce these two projects, and Mezrich's already working on the 'Americans' script.