Jodie Foster Suggests Martin Scorsese’s ‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Would Have Worked Better As An 8-Hour Streaming Series

Jodie Foster has suggested Martin Scorsese‘s 2023 epic Killers Of The Flower Moon would have worked better an eight-hour streaming drama, rather than as a three-and-a-half-hour movie.

The Oscar-winning actress and director made the comment in an on-stage conversation on Sunday at the Marrakech Film Festival where she was feted with a tribute award this weekend.

Foster was talking about her embrace of the streaming drama model in the wake of her experience on True Detective, suggested the format had replaced the theatrical feature as a means to explore big narratives.

“Streaming is able to do things that we’re not able to do in traditional mainstream movies anymore. Real narrative now in the United States is on streaming. Big franchise superhero movies are what you see in the movie theaters, but the real, real narrative is on streaming,” she said.

“You’re able to tell eight-hour stories, or five-season stories, where you can explore every angle in a way that you could never in a feature. I love the freedom of that.”

She gave Scorsese’s adaptation of Eric Roth’s book on murders of Osage tribe members in 1920s Oklahoma as an example of a story that would have worked better as a high-end streaming series rather than a long movie.

“He wanted to explore the experience of Native America at that time and what we had was a very interesting movie about two guys who go back and forth and talk to each other,” she said, referring to the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

The actress and director suggested Scorsese could have better told the story from different angles with a longer streamer drama.

“Everybody was sort of excited that the native story was going to be told and what they found was like, ‘Wow, all the native women are dead’,” she said.

“They said, ‘Well, it’s a feature, we didn’t have time’, but there was time. There was an eight-hour limited series that was not made, that could have been made where, if you really needed to explore all the male toxic masculinity, you could have done that, but you could have had episode two actually centered on the native story.”

Foster’s comments were surprising given her strong bond with Scorsese ever since he cast her as a 12-year-old in Taxi Driver, and came less than 24 hours after the director sent a special video message to accompany her Marrakech tribute award ceremony on Saturday.

However, the comments were not said in negative manner.

Alluding to Scorsese’s “great” 2016 show Vinyl, Foster said hoped Scorsese would do more high-end drama.  

“I can’t wait until he embraces that even more, because he has so much to bring to the table,” she said. “So many filmmakers have so much to bring to the table, but they have this idea of, ‘Oh, wait I just want to make a feature, but I don’t want to make an hour and 45 minute feature. I want to make a five hour feature. You’re like, wait, why are we doing that in the theater?”