A Twisted Path for a Twisted Tale

So much for this being a Leonardo DiCaprio vehicle. Way back in 2010, he was announced as the star of a forthcoming film adaptation of The Devil in the White City, a best-selling 2003 criminal history by Erik Larson. Martin Scorsese was to have directed the picture for Paramount. Nine years later, news spread that DiCaprio and Scorsese would executive produce the project.

Now, The Matrix’s Keanu Reaves is in talks to replace DiCaprio as the lead in a limited Hulu-TV series version of Larson’s splendid yarn (though both DiCaprio and Scorsese are said to still be attached to the project). As Deadline explains,

The Devil in the White City tells the true story of two men, an architect and a serial killer, whose fates were forever linked by the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. It follows Daniel H. Burnham, a brilliant and fastidious architect racing to make his mark on the world, and Henry H. Holmes, a handsome and cunning doctor who fashioned his own pharmaceutical “Murder Castle” on fair grounds—a palace built to seduce, torture and mutilate young women. The story takes the viewer on a tour of murder, romance and mystery in the gilded age.

Click here to read my long-ago review of Larson’s Devil.