Variety:

Leonardo DiCaprio is in negotiations to star in Fox Searchlight’s remake of “Nightmare Alley," Guillermo del Toro’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning film “The Shape of Water."

Del Toro will direct the pic and co-wrote the script with Kim Morgan. The pic is being produced and financed by del Toro and J. Miles Dale with TSG Entertainment, with Fox Searchlight acquiring worldwide distribution rights to the film.

While there is a 1947 Fox pic that starred Tyrone Power, this film will be more based on the William Lindsay Gresham novel of the same name.

Hell yeah!

If you’re like me, and haven’t heard of the novel, here’s a synopsis.

Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic crowd’s gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. William Lindsay Gresham’s novel is a dark jewel, a classic American tale about the varieties of deception and self-deception and the dream of redemption—a dream that is only a nightmare in disguise.

Sounds wild.