Paramount has officially picked up Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's Killers of the Flower Moon movie adaptation. The project marks the sixth collaboration overall for the Oscar-winning director and actor, following their efforts on Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Shutter Island, and 2007's Best Picture-winner, The Departed. Most recently, the pair teamed up to bring the story of infamous ex-stockbroker Jordan Belfort to life in 2013's biographical drama-satire, The Wolf of Wall Street.
With a track record like that, it's little wonder that their fans have been anxiously waiting to see what DiCaprio and Scorsese would end up tackling next. The pair began circling Killers of the Flower Moon in 2017 and made their plans official last October. Now, the project has found a distributor and financier, and seems to be on its way to starting production as soon as this summer (as previously-planned), or possibly early fall.
According to Deadline, Paramount chief Jim Gianopulos announced that his studio has closed a deal to finance and release Killers of the Flower Moon during their presentation at CineEurope in Barcelona. DiCaprio, as previously reported, will both star in and produce the film, with Scorsese directing from an adapted script by Oscar-winner Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, The Insider, A Star is Born).
Killers of the Flower Moon will explore a string of real-life murders that took place in Osage Country, Oklahoma in the 1920s, shortly after the Osage Native Americans were granted rights to the oil discovered under their land. The film is based on the acclaimed, best selling non-fiction book by journalist David Grann (The Lost City of Z), and reveals how the murders of several Osage natives ultimately led to the creation of the FBI from the then recently-formed Bureau of Investigation. DiCaprio has previously starred in movies that touched on both the early days of the FBI (Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar) and the violence committed against Native Americans throughout history (Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant), so one can see why Killers of the Flower Moon was a story that spoke to the actor (who's known for being pretty selective about his projects), as far as the subject matter is concerned.
Both DiCaprio and Scorsese are expected to be contenders in this year's awards season race, thanks to his role in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood and the latter's Netflix hitman biography The Irishman, respectively. The pair may find themselves back in the Oscar race next year too, assuming that Killers of the Flower Moon begins shooting soon enough to make a late 2020 release date. Failing that, the pair's latest collaboration sound pretty intriguing and will hopefully keep their streak of impressive films together going strong.
Source: Deadline