Get ready for quite a ride.
The official running time of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is three hours and 26 minutes, insiders confirm. From Apple Original Films, the Western crime drama, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, is one of the longest Hollywood movies in modern times, according to data from Comscore.
Scorsese’s last film, The Irishman, was actually three minutes longer (at three hours and 29 minutes), but the 2019 Netflix movie didn’t get a full-blown theatrical release since it was primarily made for the streaming service.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a different proposition. Apple is partnering with Paramount in order to give Scorsese’s high-profile film a traditional run in cinemas across the globe before making it available at a yet-to-be-announced date on Apple TV+. (Hollywood has been buzzing about Killer’s length after reports that it ran closer to four hours.)
For any distributor, a long movie means fewer showtimes.
Yet three of the four top-grossing movies of all time at the worldwide box office have a running time of three hours or more. No. 1 is Avatar (two hours and 41 minutes), followed by Avengers: Endgame (three hours and two minutes); Avatar: The Way of Water (three hours and 12 minutes); and Titanic (three hours and 14 minutes), according to Comscore.
James Cameron — who directed Titanic and the two Avatar movies — is known for turning out longer movies, as is Scorsese, whose 2013 Oscar-nominated The Wolf of Wall Street ran three hours (not to mention Irishman).
A movie’s running time includes credits, which can take up as much as 10 minutes.
Flower Moon reunites Scorsese with DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The film will make its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month before opening in cinemas in mid-October.
The film, which Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth adapted from David Grann’s best-selling 2017 nonfiction book, centers on an FBI investigation of a series of murders of the Osage people that took place in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. It became known as the Reign of Terror after oil was discovered on tribal land.
DiCaprio, in his sixth teaming with Scorsese, plays Ernest Burkhart, the nephew of cattleman William Hale (De Niro). Gladstone, who is of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage and first broke out in Kelly Reichardt’s 2017 film Certain Women, plays Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman who has inherited an oil fortune. The cast also includes Jesse Plemons as Tom White, a former Texas Ranger investigating the murders, and Cara Jade Myers, JaNae Collins, Jillian Dion and Tantoo Cardinal.
Deadline first reported Killers of the Flower Moon’s running time.
