The Budget of Martin Scorsese's KILLER OF THE FLOWER MOON Blows Up to $225 Million and He Might Take It to Netflix

Martin Scorsese is getting ready to shoot his next film project, which is an adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon. The filmmaker is re-teaming with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro to tell this story, which will be his first western.

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.

According to Ankler newsletter, the film has a budget of $225 million, and that budget is making Paramount Pictures very nervous. Rumor has it that Netflix could end up jumping into pick up the film to push it forward, and even if they aren’t planning on doing that, Scorsese reportedly hopes that they do.

Netflix gave Scorsese all the money and freedom that he wanted forThe Irishman, so it makes sense that he would want to have that support system again. It seems a lot better than having to deal with studio executives being freaked out over the budget throughout the production.

The question is, does Scorsese really need to $225 million to make this movie!? That’s more than the budget that Marvel Studios gets for the films they make! It doesn’t seem like the kind of story that would need a budget that big, but Scorsese obviously has big, ambitious plans.