Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to 2022’s Babylon could see Leonardo DiCaprio playing the legendary stunt rider Evel Knievel for Paramount.
Babylon was a bruising experience for its director, Damien Chazelle. The 2022 ode to early Hollywood largesse only made back around $63m of its reported $100m budget, presumably leaving Paramount somewhat in the red. While the film itself wasn’t lacking in merits, audiences simply didn’t show up in force for the film and that left Chazelle publicly wondering if he was now in the dreaded ‘director’s jail’.
According to a new report from Daniel Richtman (via World Of Reel), however, Chazelle could be back with a new project – and a high-profile one at that. According to RIchtman, Chazelle is again partnering with Paramount to bring a biopic of the legendary stunt rider Evel Knievel to the screen, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role. The Departed's William Monahan is said to be penning the script.
DiCaprio films don’t come cheap, so should this claim prove to be true, it looks as though Paramount is choosing to again back Chazelle with a sizeable budget. DiCaprio was originally set to work with Chazelle on Babylon until scheduling issues forced him to bow out and he was replaced by Brad Pitt.
Evel Knievel was a professional daredevil who completed some of the craziest stunts of modern times. He started out in 1965 by jumping his motorbike over two rattlesnakes and a mountain lion before moving onto increasingly long lines of cars and trucks. His final jump was in 1977 and consisted of a 90-foot motorcycle leap over a tank of 13 sharks. (All of which makes me wonder on this cold December morning what I’ve done with my life.)
We presume this means that Chazelle’s planned mid-budget prison movie either isn’t happening or has been pushed back past this new project, given that it was supposed to be shooting in October and that never happened.
Far be it from me to besmirch the idea of a grizzled Leo ramping over sharks, but I was inwardly looking forward to seeing Chazelle shorn of a mega-budget and working with a more back-to-basics story. Whiplash, the filmmaker’s debut, is one of the best films of the 2010s and while we love seeing the filmmaker paint on the broadest of canvases, it would have been cool to see him return to a more stripped back style,too.
We’ll bring you more on Chazelle’s Evel Knievel film as we hear it.
