With Warner Bros. and Legendary pushing Dune: Part Two to 2024, Paramount and Apple Studios are sensing a hole in the theatrical marketplace, and to that end, they’ve decided to give Martin Scorsese‘s latest crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon a wide theatrical release in late October as opposed to a limited release earlier in the month.
Killers of the Flower Moon will now hit theaters nationwide on Oct. 20. It had previously been slated for release in select cities on Oct. 6. Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro star alongside Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, and this year’s reigning Best Actor winner, Brendan Fraser.
Killers will surely benefit from a strong global push by both Paramount and Apple, where the film will begin streaming at a later date this fall when it’s at least a little more likely that DiCaprio and his co-stars will be able to promote the movie — though not everyone is optimistic that the SAG-AFTRA strike will be over by then.
The film premiered at Cannes to largely positive reviews, and it has been positioned as one of the season’s frontrunners alongside Christopher Nolan‘s Oppenheimer. Pundits are predicting nominations for DiCaprio, supporting actress Gladstone, and Scorsese, who previously won for The Departed. The director also co-wrote the script with Eric Roth.
Set in Oklahoma in the 1920s, Killers of the Flower Moon centers around a string of serial murders targeting members of the Osage Nation, which had grown wealthy due to priceless oil fields that made them the envy of greedy white settlers. This series of crimes became known as the Reign of Terror, and they directly led to the formation of the FBI.
Based on David Grann‘s bestselling book of the same name, Killers of the Flower Moon will run nearly three-and-a-half hours, and its theatrical release will include IMAX theaters, for which the film will be digitally re-mastered. This is certainly one movie I can’t wait to see on the biggest, loudest screen possible.
