After Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio will work together again on The Wager, which will be shown on Apple TV+. Read this!
Since its launch in November 2019, Apple TV+ has been the talk of the town, quickly becoming a top choice for subscribers. The streamer has hired Martin Scorsese to direct The Wager, which is based on David Grann’s epic work of historical nonfiction. Leonardo DiCaprio will play the lead role. These seven projects mark Scorsese and DiCaprio’s seventh work together. They have previously worked on The Wolf of Wall Street, Gangs of New York, The Departed, Shutter Island, and the recently released Killers of the Flower Moon, which also stars Robert De Niro. What can we expect from the seventh time these two movie stars get back together?
The movie is being produced by Dan Friedkin, Bradley Thomas, and Scorsese through Sikelia Productions. DiCaprio and his partner Jennifer Davisson will be producing through their own company, Appian Way Productions. Richard Pleper is in charge of making the movie under the Eden Productions banner. The movie Killers of the Flower Moon was also shown on Apple TV, which shows that the streaming service really wants to keep Scorsese as a director. This project is getting a lot of attention, so let’s talk about what fans of Scorsese and DiCaprio should know about The Wager and Grann’s well-reviewed books!
This article has been updated with new information about Martin Scorsese’s movie The Wager as of October 20, 2023.
The Wager: The Plot
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, an epic novel by best-selling author David Grann, came out to great reviews in April 2023. Early descriptions (and the descriptive title) say that it is a story of a shipwreck, mutiny, and murder. The novel is about thirty thin, almost-dead men who came ashore in Brazil on January 28, 1742, on a raft that was made out of anything that could be found. The men were on His Majesty’s The Wager, a top-secret ship that was looking for treasure. The ship sank while chasing “the prize of all oceans,” a Spanish ship full of valuables worth a lot of money. This happened during the imperial war with Spain.
The survivors spent months stuck on a desert island. They built the raft, set sail, and drifted at sea for 100 days before arriving in Brazil as heroes. What comes next is the most interesting part of the story, not this part.
Six months after this happened, an even worse-torn raft washes up on shore in Chile, holding three people who had a very different view of what the thirty had said. These three stowaways said that the thirty heroes of The Wager were mutineers, which is the worst kind of treason in His Majesty’s navy. Many people are accused, and the outcome could mean being found not guilty or being put to death in Grann’s intense story of duty and dutylessness, loyalty and rayal, truth and lie.
The book became a big hit right away. In fact, it was the best-selling nonfiction book in The New York Times for the first week it was out. It was still #10 on their list of best-selling hardcover non-fiction books after twenty-four weeks. After adapting Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese and DiCaprio bought the rights to the book for the big screen in 2022, before it even came out.
The Wager: The Cast & Crew
Scorese and DiCaprio are the only known names connected to the movie so far. The Wager’s deeply divided themes give the legendary director a lot to work with as a master craftsman. Once again, DiCaprio will give a dedicated performance. He did a great job in the survival drama The Revenant. Scorsese loves stories with strong characters, gory images, and cruel motivations, and The Wager is full of all of these things.
The story takes place all over the world, but its main idea and the huge consequences it has are very limited to this one time period, this one event, and this time when the British Navy was strong. We can only guess that Scorsese will make money off of the movie’s bigger ideas and appeal to a wider audience. DiCaprio is all he needs to make it happen.