Whiplash director Damien Chazelle currently has a prison movie on his slate – with Daniel Craig potentially starring.
Here’s some interesting news to begin the week: it looks like Damien Chazelle’s untitled prison movie project may still be alive and well. Not only that, but the project could yet become the Whiplash director’s next film if Leonardo DiCaprio doesn’t commit to leaping over 20 double decker buses while riding motorbike for Chazelle’s planned biopic of the legendary stunt rider, Evel Knievel.
A short recap.
In 2022, Chazelle released Babylon, an expensive ode to the excesses of Old Hollywood. It was a resounding piece of cinema but didn’t land with audiences and proved to be a costly loss for Paramount. In the wake of Babylon’s financial failure, Chazelle even publicly admitted that he could be in ‘director jail’ and spoke candidly about his fears that his next project might not even get made.
Perhaps trying to anticipate some difficult pitch meetings, Chazelle began development on an untitled prison movie, something that was said to have a much smaller budget than Babylon and perhaps more in line with his debut film, Whiplash.
That was all coming along throughout 2024, until out of nowhere, at the beginning of this year, the filmmaker was linked to a Evel Knievel biopic with DiCaprio. Paramount is said to be the studio again backing the filmmaker – with plenty of cash too, we’d presume.
That project now looks to be in limbo, however – awaiting the confirmation of DiCaprio’s involvement.
According to Daniel Richtman (via World Of Reel), it looks like Daniel Craig is now in line to headline Chazelle’s other project, should that one end up going before cameras first. The actor recently signed up for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia films and was reportedly attached to play the lead role in Luca Guadagnino’s Sgt. Rock. Although the fate of that film is now rather uncertain and Craig has departed the project anyway, with some claiming he was never officially attached to it.
In the wake of Babylon's commercial failure, Chazelle has watched his contemporaries such as Gerwig and Ryan Coogler go on to industry-defining success. Gerwig’s Barbie was an incredibly important post-pandemic film for Hollywood and she’s currently rewriting the Netflix playbook for cinema releases with her upcoming Narnia project.
Likewise, Coogler has also signaled to a new way forward for Hollywood filmmakers through the success of Sinners and its novel financial setup, which will see him own the film outright in a couple of decades.
Chazelle belongs in a cohort of young and talented filmmakers that could yet pull the film industry away from the black hole of corporate conformity. A modestly-budgeted prison movie that takes artistic risks and proves to be hugely popular could well do that, especially with an actor of Daniel Craig’s calibre in the lead role. We’ll bring you more as we hear it.
