New Killers of the Flower Moon Trailer Better Represents the Movie

Movies

The fall movie season is coming fast, and the prestige marketing is in play. Paramount Pictures and Apple TV+ have released a new trailer for Martin Scorsese’s upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon. Based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (which was, in turn, based on a true story), Killers of the Flower Moon recounts a series of murders coinciding with an oil company’s attempt to mine the land of the Osage Native American tribe. Leonardo DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Robert De Niro, Brendan Fraser, and John Lithgow star. Killers of the Flower Moon will arrive in theaters for a limited release on October 20, 2023, before streaming on Apple TV+ at a later date. You can see the new trailer below:

The first Killers of the Flower Moon trailer focused on the murders and the criminal investigation, but this one emphasizes the exploitation of the tribe by De Niro’s oil baron with the murders in the background. That sounds closer to what the movie will be like; Martin Scorsese recently said to Time that the script had been reworked:

“After a certain point, I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys… Meaning I was taking the approach from the outside in, which concerned me.”

That is in line with the book, which was more about the formation of the FBI than the Osage tribe. This trailer conveys that, and I get why Scorsese wants to tell this aspect of the story: he then gets to dive into a culture rather than see it strictly from the standpoint of observers. DiCaprio’s character may be the lead, but he’s also immersed in the Osage tribe when he marries Lily Gladstone’s character. (According to that Time story, DiCaprio also ad-libbed that line about what Gladstone calls him being “Indian for ‘Handsome Devil,’” with the laugh it generates from Gladstone being genuine; he’s a legend.) I’m very interested in seeing this one, and I’m glad it’s going to be in theaters before it lands on Apple TV+, to which I don’t subscribe.