'Nightmare Alley' Remake Will Team Leonardo DiCaprio With Guillermo Del Toro

Guillermo del Toro is ready to return to directing after winning an Oscar for The Shape of Water. The filmmaker will helm a remake of the 1940s noir Nightmare Alley, and he's already attracting some serious star power. Leonardo DiCaprio is in talks to star in del Toro's movie, which will follow a con-man who teams up with a psychic, and then later a psychiatrist, to scam people. Since del Toro's involved, I'm assuming some sort of sexy monster will show up at some point. But maybe not.Variety broke the news about Leonardo DiCaprio in talks to join Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley. The film would be adapted from the novel byWilliam Lindsay Gresham, which was previously adapted into a 1947 original movie. The novel is described as "a ferocious psychological portrait of a charismatic carnival hustler, creates an unforgettable atmosphere of duplicity, corruption, and self-destruction." Here's the plot of the 1947 movie adaptation:

Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) joins a traveling carny and unsuccessfully schemes to figure out the mind-reading act of Mademoiselle Zeena (Joan Blondell) and her alcoholic husband, Pete (Ian Keith). But when Pete dies, Zeena is forced to take on Stanton as a partner, and he quickly proves more gifted than his predecessor. Ambitious to a fault, Carlisle abandons Zeena and the carny to reinvent himself as "The Great Stanton," wowing high-class audiences in a Chicago hotel.

Eventually, Stanton teams up with psychiatrist Dr. Lilith Ritter, and the two start up an act in which Stanton pretends to channel "the dead relatives of high-class socialites." However, one of the scams backfires. Variety's says the story follows a "con-man who hooks up with a female psychiatrist who is even more corrupt than he is. At first, they enjoy success fleecing people with their mentalist act, but then she turns the table on him, out-manipulating the manipulator."