Following their recent collaboration on Killers of the Flower Room, Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese will be teammates again for a new project by Apple Original Films. The new film is based on an adaptation of David Grann’s soon-to-be-released nonfiction book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder.
This will be DiCaprio and Scorsese’s second film based on a book by Grann, who also wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, which traces a probes into the 1920s murders of Osage people in Oklahoma. The prolific author also penned The Lost City of Z, The Death of Sherlock Holmes, and The White Darkness. Apple Studios is also involved in developing a limited-series film based on White Darkness starring Tom Hilldeston. That project is being developed by Soo Hugh, (Pachinko and The Terror).
Killers of the Flower Moon was the first film DiCaprio and Scorsese had done together since The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013. With a cast that includes Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Lily Gladstone, Tantoo Cardinal and many others, Killers was originally set to debut this fall but has been postponed to 2023, perhaps at film festivals in Cannes or Venice.
Over the past quarter century, DiCaprio and Scorsese have been paired in six films, including Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Shutter Island, including the aforementioned The Wolf of Wall Street and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Author David Grann is no stranger to Hollywood, with several of his works having been adapted for the big screen. They include The Lost City of Z produced in 2016 by Brad Pitt’s Plan B Entertainment. In 2018, his The Old Man & The Gun was done with Robert Redford.
Producers for The Wager include Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas of Imperative Entertainment, Scorsese for Sikelia Productions, and DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson for Appian Way Productions.