Martin Scorsese is ready to make history once again thanks to his next film, Killers of the Flower Moon, produced by Apple that will arrive in theaters in October, but it will first debut at the Cannes Festival.
While speaking with Variety, Cannes director Thierry Fremaux was asked about Killers of the Flower Moon’s runtime. Answering, he said it was 5 minutes longer than Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America from 1984. This means Scorsese’s new movie will be 3 hours and 54 minutes long. But, of course, this is not the final runtime by any means, and may change throughout post-production.
If this is true, Killers of the Flower Moon will become the longest movie since the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind, with a runtime of 3 hours and 58 minutes. Scorsese’s latest film, The Irishman, was 3 hours and 30 minutes long, so this will not be a surprise for the director’s fans.
In fact, Killers of the Flower Moon could be even longer since Once Upon a Time in America has three different cuts, with one reaching 4 hours and 11 minutes.
What to Expect from Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese's new film is based on true events, compiled by the book The Flower Moon Murders: Crimes in the Osage Nation and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann, a New York Times bestseller published in 2017. Killers of the Flower Moon follows the story of a plot that killed nearly sixty members of the Osage tribe in the United States. The story is set between 1921 and 1925, after World War I, when the structures that would give rise to the famous Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were also shaped.
The story tells how, in the latter part of the 19th century, the Osage Indian tribe of Oklahoma was granted the right to benefit from a fair amount of oil deposits on their land. As a result, the community amassed a fortune in the tens of millions of dollars, making it one of the richest in the world.
The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons, Lily Gladstone, John Lithgow, and Brendan Fraser, among other big names in the industry.