The long-gestating period serial killer film The Devil in the White City, which for almost a decade has been a mooted collaboration between Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese, is reportedly on the way to production, it has been reported.
According to Deadline, the project is now set up with Hollywood studio 20th Century, which since 2019 has been a subsidiary of Disney after its purchase of Rupert Murdoch’s film and TV studio 20th Century Fox.
Adapted from Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, it is about notorious murderer HH Holmes, who is alleged to have tortured and killed dozens of victims, mostly in his “Murder Castle” in Chicago in the 1890s in the run-up to the 1893 World’s Fair. (Holmes was tried and executed in 1896 for a single killing, of his accomplice Benjamin Pitezel.)
DiCaprio acquired the rights to Larson’s book in 2010, and Scorsese’s involvement was revealed in 2015, shortly after the pair had a substantial box office hit with the stocks trader comedy The Wolf of Wall Street. Although a script by Billy Ray had been completed, the film never materialised and in 2022 the project was converted to a TV series for US streaming platform Hulu, with Keanu Reeves in the lead role and Todd Field directing. It stalled again a year later after Reeves and Field left the project.
A finished film is not likely to appear soon. Deadline reports that no script is attached to the current version of the project, while Scorsese has at least two major feature projects on hand – an adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s novel A Life of Jesus and a biopic of singer Frank Sinatra – as well as Shipwrecks of Sicily, a documentary about marine archaeology. DiCaprio will next be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s as yet untitled new film, due out in August.
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