Martin Scorsese in Talks with Netflix and Apple About Funding His $200+ Million Film KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON
As expected, Martin Scorsese is looking to take his next film project, Killers of the Flower Moon to a streaming service platform. According to The Wall Street Journal, the filmmaker is currently in talks with Netflix and Apple.
The movie will star Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro and the film reportedly has a budget of $225 million. The movie was originally set up at Paramount Pictures, but that budget isn’t something that the studio is comfortable with. Does Paramount Pictures even have that kind of money!? I don’t think they even gave the Transformers movies that kind of a production budget!
I have no idea why Scorsese thinks he needs that kind of money for this film. It seems like a film that could easily be made for, at the most, $60 million. The film is based on the non-fiction book by David Grann, with a script written by Eric Roth. The story is described as follows:
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Osage Indians were driven onto a presumed worthless expanse of land in northeastern Oklahoma. But their territory turned out to be atop one of the largest oil deposits in the United States; to obtain that oil, prospectors were required to pay the tribe for leases and royalties. By the 1920s, the members of Osage Nation had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world. And then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.
This is a fascinating story and I’d love to see the movie get made, but he honestly doesn’t need over $200 million to make it! When previously talking about the film, Scorsese explained:
“We think it’s a western. It happened in 1921-1922 in Oklahoma. They are certainly cowboys, but they have cars and also horses. The film is mainly about the Osage, an Indian tribe that was given horrible territory, which they loved because they said to themselves that Whites would never be interested in it. Then we discovered oil there and, for about ten years, the Osage became the richest people in the world, per capita. Then, as with the Yukon and the Colorado mining regions, the vultures disembark, the White man, the European arrives, and all was lost. There, the underworld had such control over everything that you were more likely to go to jail for killing a dog than for killing an Indian.”
It’ll be interesting to see where this movie lands and if Scorsese actually ends up getting that massive budget.