Bradley Cooper Might Replace Leonardo DiCaprio In Del Toro’s NIGHTMARE ALLEY

But not in our hearts. Never in our hearts.

And lo, through the tumbleweeds did a wild news story appear on this wasteland of a Friday. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Bradley Cooper is in "early talks" to join Guillermo del Toro's next project, Nightmare Alley. Cooper would be replacing Leonardo DiCaprio as the male lead in the film, which del Toro is directing from a screenplay he co-wrote with Kim Morgan. Del Toro's follow-up to the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water (spoiler: it's shaped like fish man dong) is based on William Lindsay Gresham's novel of the same name, and is said to be more of a new adaptation of that work than a remake of the 1947 adaptation, directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. Gresham's novel is split into six chapters, each representing a different Tarot card, and is described as follows: 


The 1947 adaptation was a film noir that centered on a con-man (that'd be Stan) who teams up with a psychotherapist to swindle gullible folks by pretending to be a medium. If the deal goes through, Cooper would be playing the role of Stan Carlisle, making Nightmare Alley his first horror film since the 2008/2009 era of The Midnight Meat Train and Case 39 – and that's if Nightmare Alley is even a horror movie. It might be a gothic romance.