Having rescued Tom Hanks WWII drama The Greyhound from the choppy waters of release date purgatory, Apple have now performed their biggest streaming service flex yet by acquiring Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for a potential Apple TV+ release.
Deadline reports that Apple won a bidding war to become the studio in charge of the Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro epic, taking the reported $180 million financial burden away from Paramount, who interestingly enough were the backers of Scorsese’s The Irishman, before Netflix took it off their hands. The major difference here appears to be that Killers of the Flower Moon will become an Apple Original film, but Paramount will retain worldwide distribution rights for a theatrical release.
Based on David Grann’s bestselling book, Killers of the Flower Moon takes place in the 1920s and tells the story of one of the FBI’s first major investigations – the grisly murders of members of the Native American Osage Nation, whose land in Oklahoma sat above a large reserve of crude oil.
Written by Eric Roth, who has Dune, The Insider, Munich and Forrest Gump clogging up his CV, Killers of the Flower Moon will reunite Scorsese with two of his go-to actors, as-well-as bringing DeNiro and DiCaprio together for the first time since 1993’s This Boy’s Life.
