Jodie Foster thinks Killers of the Flower Moon should have been an eight-hour miniseries

At nearly three-and-a-half hours, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon was already a long movie, but Jodie Foster thinks it could have been longer. In fact, she believes it should have been expanded into an eight-hour limited series.

Jodie Foster and Robert Downey Jr. chatted for Variety’s Actors on Actors, and both actors have recently had experiences with limited series, Foster with True Detective: Night Country and Downey Jr. with The Sympathizer.

“This is the beauty of having limited series,” Foster said. “You can expand on a story. I was thinking of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ — extraordinary movie, three-and-a-half hours long. And I thought, ‘I wonder why they didn’t do it eight hours long’ — to be able to explore all these other people, and give them another perspective. The great thing about limited series is you can have that novelistic idea of going off into tangents and tying them together.“

Based on David Grann’s best-selling crime thriller, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon tells the real-life mystery of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s, who became wealthy after oil was discovered beneath their land. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off, and the ensuing spiral of conspiracy, greed and murder got so bad that the FBI had to step in. There is certainly enough story and characters for Killers of the Flower Moon to be more than doubled in length, but some believe the movie was already too long, with certain theaters even tossing in an intermission without permission. Tsk tsk.

Although our own Chris Bumbray acknowledged the runtime in his review, he never had a problem with is as “Scorsese and his ace editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, know precisely how to pace a movie like this. It’s long, but it never drags, and indeed, part of me hopes the streaming version is even more extended as I’d love to dive even deeper into the material.” You can check out the rest of Bumbray’s review right here.

Meanwhile, we’re still waiting for Killers of the Flower Moon to be given a physical media release in North America.