The Hollywood studio Paramount has beaten Universal in a bidding war for the rights to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo da Vinci. The biopic on the fifteenth-century Renaissance artist and inventor will star Leonardo DiCaprio, who will also produce the film, Variety reported.
“DiCaprio’s desire to portray da Vinci on film is no coincidence,” the Variety report said. “The actor’s mother famously claims to have chosen the artist as her son’s namesake when she felt an in utero DiCaprio kick for the first time while examining a da Vinci piece at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy back in 1974.”
Isaacson has written numerous biographies, including Steve Jobs, which was made into the 2015 Danny Boyle film of the same name, and Einstein: His Life and Universe, which was adapted as the National Geographic’s show Genius.