Leonardo DiCaprio will star in The Devil in the White City, to be directed by Scorsese for Paramount.
The Scorsese-DiCaprio connection proves to be one of the most creative and fruitful collaborations in film history. Alongside with The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio and Scorsese have made Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Shutter Island together.
DiCaprio will play H.H. Holmes, who murdered between 27 and 200 people, mostly single young women.
Set against the backdrop of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, The Devil in the White City tells the intertwining stories of fair architect Daniel H. Burnham and Holmes, who used a hotel he built near the fairgrounds to lure his victims.
The project, which has been in the works for more than a decade, reunites DiCaprio with Scorsese two years after the Oscar nominated The Wolf of Wall Street.
Paramount won an auction to buy the movie rights to Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. The studio has previously owned the rights twice.
Billy Ray, whose credits include Captain Phillips and The Hunger Games, will write the script.
The producers are DiCaprio and his Appian Way partner Jennifer Davisson along with Stacey Sher, Scorsese and Rick Yorn.
The Devil in the White City was first put in development in Hollywood by Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner through their Cruise/Wagner banner via the shingle’s deal with Paramount, but the option lapsed in 2004.
Paramount reacquired the film rights in 2007 and set it up with producers Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher, whose Double Feature Films had a first-look deal with the studio at that point.
