Leonardo DiCaprio's next significant role has been secured. In Jim Jones, the actor will play the religious cult leader who planned a mass suicide that killed over 900 people. According to Deadline, DiCaprio is in final discussions to star in the film, which he will produce alongside Jennifer Davisson under his Appian Way label.

Jones was the founder of the Peoples Temple, a Christian Socialism organization that founded in Indianapolis in 1955.He founded the Peoples Temple in San Francisco in the mid-1960s and became a political activist. He began abandoning orthodox Christianity in the early 1970s and claimed to be God. In 1974, he began construction on Jonestown in Guyana, and he began persuading his followers to move there in order to be free of the US government.

In 1978, claims of human rights violations in Jonestown surfaced in the media, prompting U.S. Representative Leo Ryan to send a team to the commune to investigate. Jonestown gunmen shot and murdered Ryan and his companions, as well as Jonestown inhabitants who wished to return to the United States, as they prepared to depart.