One of the highest-profile films circulating around Hollywood has been the Martin Scorsese-directed film, Killers of the Flower Moon, which will feature Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro in the lead roles. There has been a tug of war over who would land the project but it appears that war is just about over.
It has been announced that Apple has won the chance to release the movie as an Apple original film while Paramount Pictures will distribute theatrically worldwide. Paramount still needs to sign off on the deal but “Deadline” reports that it is pretty much a done deal. Paramount acquired the project some time ago from Imperative Entertainment but allowed Scorsese and DiCaprio’s manager Rick Yorn to shop the film around due to the project’s excessive $180-200 million price tag after tax credits from an Oklahoma location shoot. Once Yorn began shopping it around, Universal, MGM, Netflix, and Apple began chasing the project with Apple coming out on top.
The new deal calls for Apple to finance and become the creative studio which cuts down the monetary risk that Paramount Pictures would take on and it gives the film the best of both worlds hybrid situation. The project will get a wide theatrical release through Paramount before it goes on to become the biggest film title so far on Apple’s streaming service. It will make the second huge movie deal for Apple after they acquired Greyhound, the WWII film that stars Tom Hanks which fell off its planned summer release date this year due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Killers of the Flower Moon is based on the David Grann book “Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI.” The book is a mystery about a series of murders of wealthy Osage Native Americans in Oklahoma in the early 1920s after oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. The ensuing investigation established the FBI.
