Jonah Hill to play Jerry Garcia in Martin Scorsese's next Apple movie

Apple seems to be showering a lot of attention—and cash—on Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon with Leonardo DiCaprio, Jesse Plemons, and Brendan Fraser, but even though the project seems suspiciously like content, the relationship with Apple is clearly going well from Scorsese’s point of view. That’s because he has just announced another Apple TV+ movie, and it already has a big-name star and big-name subject matter.

This comes from Deadline, which says Scorsese’s next movie after Killers Of The Flower Moon is an untitled biopic about The Grateful Dead with Jonah Hill both producing and starring as frontman Jerry Garcia. Deadline doesn’t know what time period will be covered in the movie, but hopefully Scorsese’s aiming a little higher than the Bohemian Rhapsody-style Oscar bait that’s starting to clog up Hollywood. (He would absolutely dismiss something like that as content, right? It doesn’t have to be superhero movies.)

At the very least, Apple does seem to have the rights to the Grateful Dead catalog and “the band and the group’s management” are participating in the film. That’s good, and it makes us wonder why Apple doesn’t make more musical biopics. Surely there’s some fine print in the iTunes Store that gives it control over the libraries of some artists, right?

Scorsese’s untitled Grateful Dead movie is being written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, who most recently wrote FX’s American Crime Story: Impeachment. Deadline also points out that Scorsese previously made the Grateful Dead documentary Long Strange Trip a few years ago, but this is his first full-on musician biopic. As for Hill, he’s apparently been “looking for something to work on” with Scorsese since Wolf Of Wall Street, if you can imagine that. Maybe actors like working with directors who are very famous and helped them get Oscar nominations?