When you have Oscar winners Robert De Niro, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Brendan Fraser in your movie, you arguably might want them on screen for as long as possible — and that’s what Martin Scorsese apparently got with his newest picture.
Based on a bestselling book, the Academy Award-winning directing legend’s latest film is reportedly clocking in at 3 hours and 26 minutes long.
The Apple Studios production is actually three minutes shorter than Scorsese’s The Irishman, which also starred De Niro, but that film was made primarily to stream on Netflix.
Quoting Comscore data, The Hollywood Reporter notes that Flower Moon, the runtime of which includes credits, is one of the longest theatrical movies on record in modern times.
Theater chains may gripe at longer runtimes, because they can screen a long movie fewer times a day compared to a 90-minute rom-com, which means fewer tickets and fewer buckets of popcorn. But some of the highest grossing movies of all time were long ones: Avengers: Endgame, #2 of all time, was three hours and two minutes; #3, James Cameron‘s Avatar: The Way of Water ran three hours and 12 minutes; and #4, also a Cameron film, Titanic, clocked in at 3:14.
By comparison, Cameron’s original Avatar, the highest grossing movie of all time, ran a relatively sprightly 2 hours and 41 minutes long.
Based on David Grann‘s bestselling book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon is set in 1920s Oklahoma and depicts the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a murder spree known locally as the Reign of Terror.
The movie debuts in limited release from Paramount Pictures on October 6; wide release comes October 20. It comes to Apple TV+ after it goes wide.
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