Killers of the Flower Moon: Scorsese’s Epic Clocks in at 3 Hours and 26 Minutes

Scorsese’s ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Clocks in at 3 Hours and 26 Minutes

The Western crime drama starring DiCaprio, De Niro and Lily Gladstone is among the longest Hollywood studio movies, but is three minutes shorter than Scorsese’s The Irishman.

Scorsese’s last film The Irishman, which was Oscar-nominated, was actually 3 minutes longer (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.

For any distributor, a long movie means fewer showtimes.

Yet three of 4 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 (3 hours and 2 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 De Niro. The film will make its premiere at the Cannes Film Fest 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 non-fiction 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).

Gladsrone, 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.