It was just earlier today when we wondered if Martin Scorsese–as he completes a new short film in isolation–was able to lock in financing for Killers of the Flower Moon as the cost ballooned and Paramount balked at putting up the entire budget, around $180-$200 million. Well, a savior has now arrived.
Apple has come aboard to finance the western, Deadline reports. Scorsese will get the best of both worlds too, as Paramount will also distribute the film theatrically worldwide. Based on the stellar book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann and scripted by Eric Roth, production was set to already be underway in Oklahoma with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio leading the cast.
Buried in Variety‘s article, they note that DiCaprio was eyeing a few other projects, one of them being Adam McKay’s upcoming film with Jennifer Lawrence and Cate Blanchett. If he does decide to do that project, it could go first and Killers of the Flower Moon might have to push production, which would be unfortunate, to say the least.
“We think it’s a western,” Scorsese recently said of the project. “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.”