While it’s been very difficult of late to figure out what Martin Scorsese will follow Killers of the Flower Moon (already a couple years out from its Cannes premiere), today brings some of the closest confirmation of where he’ll head next. Surprise: Leonardo DiCaprio is coming with.

Per Publisher’s Weekly, Apple Original Films have obtained rights to Marilynne Robinson’s four Gilead novels, the second of which, Home, Scorsese has discussed since 2023. DiCaprio will lead the film, produced by Todd Field, who’s co-written Home with Scorsese and Kent Jones while said to be handling the first entry, Gilead, though the article notes an ambiguity around “plans to adapt the remaining books in the series.”

The news suggests DiCaprio would play Jack Boughton, a wayward alcholic who returns to his hometown of Gilead to take care of a dying father alongside his sister Glory. These roles recur in Robinson’s other books, suggesting notable commitments from DiCaprio and whoever is cast therein––a major prospect all its own. Whatever transpires, it’s wonderful knowing Scorsese is nearing a project for which he’s expressed such passion.

My friends at Pod Casty for Me––a show that began as a look at the films of Clint Eastwood before transitioning to a series on Paul Schrader––spoke to the latter during his Oh, Canada press tour, scoring an extended and enlightening conversation on the political junctures at which his work does (or doesn’t stand), writing process, and a present moment that sees multiple spec scripts in different states of development. Having spoken to Schrader on three separate occasions I can vouch for it as valuable time spent with the man.

This chat also uncovered further detail on arguably the most tantalizing unmade project in Schrader’s career: Xtreme City, which would’ve paired the biggest star in the west (Leonardo DiCaprio) with the biggest star in the east (Shah Rukh Khan), was co-written by the latter’s frequent collaborator Mushtaq Shiekh, and had executive-producing credit from Martin Scorsese. Despite such dizzying pedigree and potential, the film-that-never-was––perhaps for having been initiated in the director’s pre-comeback era––is hardly remembered and rarely remarked-upon. In the New York Times‘ seminal account of making The Canyons Schrader refers to its Hollywood-Bollywood crossover as “the future of filmmaking,” until it’s noted “the Indian money dried up, and DiCaprio lost interest.”

Schrader has occasionally mentioned the project before, but never in such detail, and his story is a frustrating window into actor egos and the house of cards that is assembling any film:

“I wanted to do that, yeah. I wanted to do that with Shah Rukh Khan and Leo. In fact, we all met at Berlin. Scorsese was gonna produce it. Shah Rukh was in Berlin; Leo was there; we all met about it. Shah Rukh is the boss. He hires directors. Sometimes he hires multiple directors: he’ll hire somebody for the musical number; he’ll hire somebody else for the action; he’ll hire somebody else for the personal-relationship scenes. He can do that. He has never really worked under the harness of an auteur, and that, I could see, was starting to grate on him. And he had never done a film in the West before, and he had never been a second banana to somebody like Leo before.

And bit-by-bit—I wrote the script; I went to Mumbai several times to see him and be with him—I could feel the ground slowly eroding underneath him. So finally his commitment was provisional, and then once his commitment went from ‘firm’ to ‘provisional,’ Leo’s went from ‘firm’ to ‘provisional.’ Now you have two ‘provisional’ commitments, which means you have no commitment at all.”

As the India Times detailed in 2011, Xtreme City concerns “two men from radically different worlds, one an Indian and the other American. Both served in the UN peacekeeping force in Somalia during the 1990s. The American saves the Indian’s life then brings him home, in the aftermath they became indebted to each other.. then go their own separate ways.”

Shiekh elaborated on the narrative he’d constructed with Schrader:

“The American becomes a cop in New York, the Indian a bhai in Mumbai. Many years later, the American has a burdensome family obligation, which compels him to return to India to seek help from the Indian comrade whose life he had saved, but becomes deeper and deeper drawn into an alien world.”

Sadly, the film is almost certainly never to be made––a superstar’s demands can move mountains––but one can dream. Stay tuned for our own interview with Schrader later this week.

It’s been at least 15 years since Martin Scorsese first got involved with a biopic of Frank Sinatra, an almost too-logical pairing of Italian-Americans of a certain age from the tri-state area. Around the time of Hugo, Scorsese was so excited by 3D he considered shooting it and Silence (!) on the format; needless to say this did not come to pass. Many years went by, rights evaporated, and the busier-by-the-day octogenarian seemingly moved on.

Which makes it a great surprise, per Variety, that Scorsese’s perhaps more eager than ever to move forward: Leonardo DiCaprio is (of course) his consideration for ol’ blue eyes, while Jennifer Lawrence would portray Ava Gardner, Sinatra’s second wife and the woman who most drove him insane. Apple (of Flower Moon) and Sony are interested, which matters less when Tina Sinatra, the estate owner, has yet to give blessing. One thinks, however, it’s just a matter of time.

I’m far and away more interested in A Life of Jesus, about which we received our last update only recently, and which Variety now reports is looking to shoot later this year in Italy, Egypt, and (one second while I tug on my collar so hard it bruises vertebrae) Israel, the latter of which might be too busy committing unspeakable atrocities to facilitate production. Andrew Garfield is looking to reunite from Silence, while Miles Teller would, for some reason, also join.

The same story tells us Steven Spielberg is perhaps not taking Bullitt for the next feature. It’s instead reported he’s lined up a UFO film “based on his own original idea” with reliable David Koepp on scripting duties. Post-Fabelmans, the psychoanalytic components will be a lot harder to hide.

Only a few days after learning the highly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon will likely not see a release this year, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have put another project in the works.

THR reports the duo will reunite with Apple Original Films for another David Grann adaptation, this time based on his yet-to-be-published 2023 book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. With Scorsese in the director’s chair and DiCaprio starring, see the synopsis below:

Set in the 1740s, Wager’s story is set in motion when a patched-together boat with 30 emaciated men landed on the coast of Brazil. The men were the surviving crew of British ship that was chasing a Spanish vessel and had crashed onto an island in South America’s Patagonia region. Their tales of surviving the seas and elements made them heroes.

However, six months later another vessel, even more beat up than the first one, ended up on the coat of Chile, this one with three men. These new sailors charged that the other men were actually mutineers.

As accusations and counter-acusations flew, the British Admiralty set a special trial to uncover the truth of what exactly happened on the island, exposing a story of not just a captain and crew struggling to survive while battling some the most extreme elements on the planet, but also battling their own human natures.

With so much talk of Killers of the Flower Moon‘s massive budget and extensive post-production, it’s mighty reassuring that Scorsese is able to get the resources once again from Apple to pull off a large-scale period epic. The book is set for a release on April 18, 2023, and can be pre-ordered here.

Articulating why it’s easy to agree with writer-director Adam McKay’s politics while disliking his films isn’t so hard. Though a smart man who can hold his own riffing with Felix Biederman on a Chapo Trap House guest appearance—and also responsible for some of the funniest movies of the past 20 years (Anchorman, Step Brothers)—there still seems some limitation to The Big Short and Vice as both satire and political tracts. If it bears the fault of preaching to the choir’s anger more than offering real structural critique, one has to begrudgingly admire some qualities of his newest film, even as being annoyed for a good portion of the runtime is still expected.

The first of his new era neither based on nor inspired by a true story, Don’t Look Up takes place in an unspecified year within the current socio-political hellscape where, one night within Michigan State’s astronomy department, Ph.D student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers something while conducting a fairly benign look through the ol’ giant high-tech telescope. Her senior, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), does calculations and confirms that what she caught is in fact a planet-destroying asteroid headed towards earth.

They try to gain the attention of President Orlean (Meryl Streep), a female Trump analogue who can’t make much time to think about the asteroid due to the forthcoming mid-terms and a sex scandal involving her Supreme Court pick. Thus having to take a media tour to convince the public at large of the looming threat, Kate quickly blows her reputation with lack of television-friendly tact during a morning talk show appearance. Yet Mindy’s midwestern folksiness and “handsome face hidden under a beard and glasses” thing (Leo isn’t totally ready to play his first schlub yet) transforms him overnight into a Dr. Fauci-type celebrity who draws attention to “science” but doesn’t inspire much in the way of actual change, leaving the asteroid a problem they have to get the entire world behind.

Cleverly rendering the two astronomers as stand-ins for his own earnest alarmism and “make the medicine go down easy with some gags” personalities—let’s say Hollywood’s new Oliver Stone—you get a sense of McKay making a self-satisfied, if noble attempt to rummage through the lingering trauma of the first year of the (sadly ongoing) pandemic and make sure we don’t make the same mistake twice with our looming climate-change catastrophe. If an improvement on his two previous films, Don’t Look Up still bears faults. Maybe it’s unfair to criticize timing when films take so long to make and our problems accelerate so rapidly, but there’s something odd about a movie shot in the first months of the Biden era that takes more shots at the science-denying Donald Trump’s former Presidency than political action being rendered purely into “vote!” slogans by the spineless, corporately controlled Democratic Party who currently control Congress and the White House.

Even as some satire doesn’t totally land there’s the big plus of it being genuinely much funnier than McKay’s other prestige films, if chiefly due to excellent comedic performances—Mark Rylance channeling the voice of Herbert from Family Guy for his Elon Musk/Steve Jobs analogue, or a giggly Jonah Hill as a further failing-upwards version of Jared Kushner. And while an early scene frantically cutting around President Orlean’s office seems a worrying sign that McKay’s typically hectic editing patterns and docudrama hand-held have gotten even more grating, the film eventually situates itself firmly in a media onslaught of Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, creating a more coherent visual language than usual.

The fusion of star-studded satire, science-fiction, and apocalyptic doom begins to recall Richard Kelly’s recently reclaimed Bush-era cult classic Southland Tales, yet the difference between the two feels instructive. Kelly’s film made fewer criticisms of where our priorities lie, and was instead prescient about how overstuffed modern life was slowly transforming into something resembling channel-surfing, to which the Great Reset of an apocalypse was maybe the only answer. McKay’s media satire extends mostly to soothing celebrity culture taking precedence over the important issues, something that would’ve felt stale about five years ago. One of course can’t forget Vice having a post-credits sequence where Dick Cheney’s ascension was partly blamed on millennials who liked the Fast & Furious movies.

It seems that, despite McKay’s pretty left-wing views (for a Gen X Hollywood comedy guy), he still seems to lean a bit too much into the centrist smugness of “it’s the smart people vs. the stupid people,” which in and of itself breeds reactionary thought in the population. Perhaps it’s too much to ask of a feature film to interrogate the emotional complexity of denialism beyond being the fault of demagoguery and corporate media, but it still seems to shortchange the film’s critique. The reductive dramaturgy feels perfectly represented in DiCaprio’s character monologuing about how “the President is lying” on television, which ultimately is closer to the treacly liberalism of, say, Rob Reiner’s Shock and Awe than the edge of the aforementioned Southland Tales or even the holy grail of Dr. Strangelove.

It’s not for nothing that its bummer climax lands—maybe turn off the movie before the two goofy post credits sequences—if in part because of the defeatism, which is rare for a year-end prestige product. Once a sense of fruitlessness to the astronomers’ mission kicks in, even before the predetermined end, Don’t Look Up starts to earn a lot of goodwill, if simply because it begins to be laser-focused and genuinely melancholy. You begin to think perhaps it was up to something more complicated than just a “rallying cry” the whole time.

Don’t Look Up opens on December 10 in theaters and arrives on Netflix on December 24.

After taking a four-year break between The Revenant and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio is showing no signs of slowing down. He’ll be seen this winter in Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up and recently wrapped Martin Scorsese’s highly anticipated Killers of the Flower Moon. He’s now set a new role with a MGM project.

Deadline reports DiCaprio will lead and produce a new drama surrounding cult leader Jim Jones. The 1970s figure was behind the November 1978 Jonestown mass suicide which took 918 lives––304 of them children. With a script by Con Air and Beautiful Girls scribe Scott Rosenberg, the film will capture the life of Jones, who founded the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955 and sold it as a sect of Christian Socialism. However, by the 1970s, he rejected Christianity and claimed he himself was God, launching his socialist community Jonestown in Guyana in 1974, eventually leading to the mass suicide in 1978.

With DiCaprio recently having a brush with cult history in his previous Quentin Tarantino project, one imagines Jim Jones won’t be as revisionist of a tale but we’ll have to see which director hops on board. As we await more updates, watch a documentary on the real-life saga below.

Bouncing back from Vice, Adam McKay was all set to begin production this past spring on his next feature, Don’t Look Up, starring Jennifer Lawrence. While the pandemic halted those plans, the Netflix production is now gearing back with up with quite the insane cast.

Joining Lawrence and the previously announced Cate Blanchett and Rob Morgan will be Leonardo DiCaprio, Timothée Chalamet, Jonah Hill, Himesh Patel, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Matthew Perry, and Tomer Sisley. The film, which has been described as a comedy, tells of the two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching asteroid that will destroy Earth.

Speaking to his influences, McKay said the film is a “dark satire in the school of Wag the Dog, Doctor Strangelove, and Network and if it is half as good as any of them, I will be happy.” For those worried that DiCaprio’s involvement may mean Killers of the Flower Moon will get delayed, thankfully that’s not the case as he’ll be able to complete both projects, with this one marking his first Netflix production.

As the uninformed dimwits of Twitter argue that Martin Scorsese ever only makes one kind of movie and expose themselves as having seen but a small portion of the director’s vast oeuvre, the next film will offer further evidence of his great range. In his 50-plus year career, the director has paid homage to a number of westerns, from Rio Bravo to The Great Train Robbery to Shane to The Searchers, but he has yet to make one himself. However, he’s now entering the genre with Killers of the Flower Moon.

“We think it’s a western,” he tells Cahiers du Cinéma via Premiere. “It happened in 1921-1922 in Oklahoma. They are certainly cowboys, but they have cars and also horses. The film is mainly about the Osage, an Indian tribe that was given horrible territory, which they loved because they said to themselves that Whites would never be interested in it. Then we discovered oil there and, for about ten years, the Osage became the richest people in the world, per capita. Then, as with the Yukon and the Colorado mining regions, the vultures disembark, the White man, the European arrives, and all was lost. There, the underworld had such control over everything that you were more likely to go to jail for killing a dog than for killing an Indian.”

Firming up the main cast he adds, “Leonardo DiCaprio will play the main role, Bob (De Niro) will return to play William Hale, ‘King of the Osage Hills,’ the man responsible for most of the murders. The rest will be Native American actors. It’s so interesting to think about the mentality that leads us to this. The history of civilization goes back to Mesopotamia. The Hittites are invaded by another people, they disappear, and later it is said that they have been assimilated or, rather, absorbed. It is fascinating to see this mentality which is reproduced in other cultures, through two world wars. And which is therefore timeless, I think. Finally, this is the film that we are going to try to make.”

While Scorsese did call the concept of Gangs of New York “a western set on Mars,” Flower Moon certainly looks to be embracing more established ideas of the genre. Based on the stellar book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, (the author behind The Lost City of Z), Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Good Shepherd) has penned the script. Production is set to begin next month on location in Oklahoma, marking the largest production in the state’s history, with cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and production designer Dante Ferretti reteaming with the director. With this production timeline, Paramount Pictures could release it by late next year.

For more of Scorsese’s thoughts on westerns, check out an excerpt from his excellent film A Personal Journey Through American Movies below, and see around 50 of his favorites in the genre here.

When you’re starring in a film directed by Quentin Tarantino, it means the press tour is usually taken over by the verbose director himself as he chats about every aspect of production, film history, and no shortage of other topics. So, it’s with great pleasure the two stars of his latest film, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, had the chance to sit down for a candid one-hour interview with Marc Maron.

With the first portion largely focused on their early careers of breaking into the business, they also talked about life as globally-recognized celebrities, producing stellar films, working with Tarantino, a hilarious story about Fight Club, and why they can’t explain the plot mechanics of Ad Astra nor Inception.

In related news, we’ll likely be seeing an extended, four-hour version of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood sooner than we thought. Speaking to Collider at a recent awards event, Tarantino said of this original, longer cut, “It’s all good. It’s all great. I don’t know if an audience would sit for it, but I love it. So we showed it to Tom Rothman and it was like, ‘OK, here this all is. We know that this is a movie, but maybe you can help us out because we like everything.'” After being asked by Pitt if we’ll actually see it, Tarantino, added, “Hey look, it’s all good so once this whole thing is said and done, maybe in a year’s time, we probably will.”

As we await more updates on this longer version, check out the stars’ recent one-hour convo with Maron below, which begins around the 14:14 mark.

For more, listen to our discussion of Hollywood below on The Film Stage Show.