Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio Team With The Rock and Emily Blunt for Hawaii Crime Drama

Can you smell what The Rock (and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Martin Scorsese, and Emily Blunt) is cooking? Scorsese’s next film, after 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, will be a mob flick set in Hawaii that bears strong similarities to Goodfellas and The Departed. It seems that Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson will be playing a Hawaiian mob boss, based on a real life figure, who battled for control of Hawaii’s organized crime underworld.

Deadline reports the movie will be written by Nick Bilton, a journalist and documentarian. The synopsis is as follows: “In 1960s and 70s Hawaii, this formidable and charismatic mob boss rises to build the islands’ most powerful criminal empire, waging a brutal war against mainland corporations and rival syndicates while fighting to preserve his ancestral land…igniting the last great American mob saga, where the war for cultural survival takes place in the unlikeliest of places: paradise.”

If it seems bizarre that The Rock is being asked to take on such a serious leading role, it’s probably due to rumors of his Oscar-worthy performance in his upcoming biopic The Smashing Machine, the latest film from A24 and Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems) that features him playing MMA fighter Mark Kerr. It’s no surprise that The Rock is quickly building off of that movie’s likely success.

This marks the seventh reunion for Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese, who have worked on Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Audition, and Killers of the Flower Moon together. It is also the third reunion for Johnson and Blunt, who previously worked together on Disney’s Jungle Cruise and the aforementioned Smashing Machine.

The new film is currently seeking a distributor—which it will likely find, given the talent attached—and begin production sometime next year.