Something to watch tonight: Friday 12 January

Killers of the Flower Moon (Scorsese, 2023)

The stream­ing ser­vices are tak­ing markedly dif­fer­ent stra­tegic approaches to their prestige fea­ture film offerings.

Netflix will indulge in the bare min­im­um of a the­at­ric­al release to meet Academy Award cri­ter­ia, and then high­light the film on the home page for a week before dis­ap­pear­ing it into the long tail. See El Condé and Maestro for examples.

Prime Video don’t appear to be in the award-contender mar­ket and will try and launch a block­buster in theatres, make a quick buck, and then pro­mote it as a sub­scriber bonus for months: Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves is a good example. That’s not to say that they don’t also have qual­ity titles, just that Oscars aren’t their bag. With the news that they are lay­ing off Amazon Studios staff, it’s hard to know exactly what their bag will be in 2024.

But Apple – with one Best Picture win­ner in their port­fo­lio already – is play­ing a can­ni­er game, a game that also hap­pens to max­im­ise returns to them­selves and their co-investors.

Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (and Ridley Scott’s Napoleon) both got exten­ded the­at­ric­al releases with all of the attend­ant mar­ket­ing and pub­li­city and even though we knew both would end up on AppleTV+, we didn’t know when. Those pre­cious the­at­ric­al dol­lars were milked (and cinemas were well-supported).

Then, Killers was made avail­able as a premi­um digit­al down­load – rent or buy – and it was plat­form agnost­ic. Even little old AroVision had the chance to make some coin. Again, there was no word on when AppleTV+ sub­scribers would get to cash in.

Finally, last week, Apple announced that Killers was going to appear on AppleTV+ from today and it instantly becomes a Funerals & Snakes recom­mend­a­tion. I reviewed it here back in October when it was in cinemas and I can’t wait to see it again –although it will most likely be a Saturday night “Hollywood at Home” spe­cial rather than an end-of-the-working week veg-out session:

It’s a huge film – three hours and twenty – and there are so many ways in. I sus­pect we will be read­ing insight­ful takes on it for years to come.

As reg­u­lar read­ers will know, I don’t like writ­ing long.

I want to give you an idea of how a film made me feel while watch­ing it but I try and avoid exten­ded plot sum­mar­ies (and there’s way too much to sum­mar­ise here in any case).

Refer a friend

Suffice here to say that pair­ing a story of per­son­al spir­itu­al cor­rup­tion and that corruption’s undeni­able con­nec­tion to America’s first great found­ing stain, as well as the inex­or­able mor­al fail­ure of our cur­rent one – cap­it­al­ism – makes Killers of the Flower Moon one of the most pro­found cinema exper­i­ences of this cen­tury so far.

And the end­ing gave me a kick in the guts like noth­ing has since Schindler’s List. Virtuoso stuff.

And Scorsese at 80 is also bring­ing out the best in his collaborators.

De Niro is more engaged than I have seen him in years, the design­ers Jack Fisk (Production) and Jacqueline West (Costume) are oper­at­ing on an extraordin­ary level … and then there’s the music.

The film opens with an exten­ded scene-setting sequence with some won­der­ful sound­ing rootsy Americana music and it’s a few minutes in before you real­ise, oh, it’s Robbie Robertson.

It’s fit­ting that his last col­lab­or­a­tion with Scorsese should be his finest.

Where to watch Killers of the Flower Moon

Worldwide: Streaming on AppleTV+*

*At time of writ­ing, the film hadn’t dropped on AppleTV+ but I am assured that it is sched­uled for today and Apple’s Friday TV epis­ode drops are usu­ally late after­noon here in Aotearoa.