David Fincher's film about the birth of Facebook, The Social Network, hits cinemas this autumn. But Google, ever keen to trump that site's innovations, looks set to be the subject of its own film.

The Deadline blog is today reporting that Ken Auletta's book Googled: The End of the World As We Know It has been optioned by producer John Morris, to be used as the blueprint for a movie about Google founders (and current billionaires) Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The pair formed the company while they were PhD students at Stanford University. But despite superficial similarities with the backstory behind Facebook, built by Mark Zuckerberg and friends in their first year at Harvard, the ethos driving the two companies was quite different. Brin and Page founded Google on hard-nosed principles like "You can be serious without a suit", while Zuckerberg appears to have remained strikingly casual and idealistic, at least in the nascent years of Facebook.

Michael London, whose Groundswell Productions is handling the project, said: "It's about these two young guys who created a company that changed the world, and how the world in turn changed them.

"The heart of the movie is their wonderful edict: don't be evil. At a certain point in the evolution of a company so big and powerful, there are a million challenges to that mandate. Can you stay true to principles like that as you become as rich and powerful as that company has become? The intention is to be sympathetic to Sergey and Larry, and hopefully the film will be as interesting as the company they created."