Martin Scorsese’s New Movie Has Fans Worried Over Incredibly Long Running Time

Martin Scorsese's latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, is close to four hours long, and people are upset.

By Jessica Scott | Updated

Do you love Martin Scorsese movies? Do you love them enough to stay in your seat for four hours? Let’s hope so because, according to NME, that’s how long Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of The Flower Moon is going to be. It will premiere at Cannes on May 20, then head to theaters after that.

When Martin Scorsese debuts Killers of The Flower Moon at Cannes, it will be his first time presenting a film at that festival in over 30 years. The last time he presented a film at Cannes was 1986’s After Hours, which won him a best director award.

Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon may also be a hit with the critics. It will be jam-packed with famous faces, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro playing lead roles. The story is based on a bestselling book of the same name written by journalist David Grann, which delves into the serial killings of several Native Americans and the investigation of those killings by the FBI, which had just been formed when the story takes place in the 1920s.

With a huge budget and some huge names in the cast, it is expected that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon will really be a high-quality film, but there is just one problem: the runtime. The film is set to be around four hours long, which, as many fans are shouting about on Twitter, is a really, really, long time to sit and watch a movie.

martin scorsese killers of the flower moon

Even before Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon, it seems as if films have been getting longer and longer in the past few years. However, this is not a Marvel movie with fast-paced action scenes and explosions (at least, we don’t think so, anyway). So the movie will have to be really gripping to keep people in their seats for that amount of time. 

According to Leonardo DiCaprio, though, it will be worth it. He has called Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon a “masterpiece,” and coming from Leonardo DiCaprio, who has made some really great films in his time, that is really saying something.

Martin Scorsese also points out that Killers of The Flower Moon is not just your average, run-of-the-mill detective story that has been told a million times. “I want to explore something else,” he said, “and that is the nature of a whole way of thinking as being complicit in genocide. It’s dehumanizing people.”

Still, though, fans are nervous. Hassan Ilahi tweeted that, while he loves Martin Scorsese’s films and is looking forward to Killers of The Flower Moon, he knows from experience that a length like that doesn’t always work. He cites Scorsese’s film The Irishman as another epically long film that was loved by critics, but whose length definitely “[hindered] a viewing experience.”

Other fans tweeted that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of The Flower Moon was “definitely a skip” because it is far too long, and others said that the award-winning director needs an editor to help him trim down his films.

Another spoke for everyone when he said, “Marty, we got places to be.”

Only time will tell if Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of The Flower Moon will be worth its epic length, but in the meantime, it seems like moviegoers are getting antsy just thinking about sitting still that long to watch it.