EXCLUSIVE: In a pre-emptive situation, MGM has secured a deal for the feature film project Jim Jones, with Leonardo DiCaprio in final talks to star as the 1970s religious cult leader who was behind the mass-Jonestown suicide on November 18, 1978 that took more than 900 lives. The Oscar winner will produce for his Appian Way company alongside Jennifer Davisson.
MGM scooped up the Scott Rosenberg-penned script in what we hear was a seven-figure deal. The Venom scribe will also executive produce Jim Jones.
Jones founded the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955, and hailed it as a fully integrated congregation promoting Christian Socialism. By the 1970s he openly rejected traditional Christianity and claimed that he was God. He constructed Jonestown in Guyana in 1974 and spurred a following to live with him there as he touted a socialist paradise free from U.S. government oppression. Amid rumors of human rights abuses, the U.S. government sent a delegation led by U.S. Representative Leo Ryan in November 1978. Ryan along with four other Jonestown defectors would eventually be gunned down by Jones’ followers. Following the shooting, Jones orchestrated a mass murder-suicide of his followers, which took 918 commune members, 304 of them children, in an act that entailed drinking Flavor Aid laced with cyanide.
DiCaprio stars next in Netflix’s Adam McKay comedy Don’t Look Up opposite Jennifer Lawrence, Jonah Hill, Timothée Chalamet, Meryl Streep and Ariana Grande among others. He also stars next in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple Originals Films. DiCaprio has been nominated at the Oscars seven times and won Best Actor for 2016’s The Revenant.
