Maybe this is what he was telling Jeff Bezos’s girlfriend Lauren Sánchez about. Per Deadline, Leonardo DiCaprio is in final talks to star in an MGM feature film as Jim Jones, the religious cult leader. The colloquial phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” is a reference to the mass murder-suicide Jones organized in 1978, when more than 900 people — a third of them children — died after ingesting a mixture laced with cyanide. Some drank willingly; others were held at gunpoint. The massacre occurred in a remote commune informally known as Jonestown, which Jones established in Guyana and advertised as a socialist utopia. Before initiating the infamous murder-suicide, Jones and his followers killed U.S. representative Leo Ryan and four other people in a group that had come to investigate the settlement for human-rights violations. Venom screenwriter Scott Rosenberg will pen the Jim Jones script, with DiCaprio and Jennifer Davisson set to produce via their company Appian Way Productions. We’re not sure what else DiCaprio is weighing as he decides whether to officially take on the role. If it helps, given that Jones died in an apparent suicide after Jonestown, the movie could potentially lend grim fodder to that theory about DiCaprio’s onscreen deaths.
