Jodie Foster Wonders Why ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Wasn't an 8-Hour Limited Series

There’s already been some criticism about Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” being too long — at almost four hours — but Jodie Foster is, yet again, saying that it wasn’t long enough.

Foster, who recently starred in HBO’s “True Detective: Night Country,” uses that show as an example of the “beauty of having a limited series” by “expanding” on a story. The gist of Foster’s argument resides in her having wanted more “perspectives” showcased in Scorsese’s retelling of the Osage Nation story (via Deadline).

It was an almost four-hour movie where he wanted to explore the experience of native America at that time [...] and I think everybody was excited that the native story was going to be told, and what they found was, like, ‘wow, all the Native women are dead.’ What they said was, “it was a feature, we didn’t have time,” but there is time, there was an 8-hour limited series that was not made, that could have been made. If you needed to explore all that male toxic masculinity, then you could have done that, but you could have Episode 2 centered on the native story, and with ‘True Detective’ I’m proud that we were able to support a native story where those ideas that we barely heard were centered.”

A year ago, Foster had similar criticism about Scorsese’s film. She just keeps bringing it up to argue why television works better for fully fleshed-out stories, with multiple perspectives.

She alluded to “streaming” as being able to tell these “eight-hour stories, or five-season stories, where you can explore every angle in a way that you could never in a feature,” and wishes more filmmakers of Scorsese’s stature could “embrace” the format instead of looking down upon it:

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?

My view on this is simple. You can herald the artistic merits of serialized television all you want, but watching a 3-hour drama without pause — and not having to set aside committed time to binge-watch it — still makes for a far more satisfying experience.

I’m starting to get real tired by the knee-jerk “this should’ve been a limited series” reaction. Movies and TV aren’t interchangeable delivery systems — they’re built differently, they breathe differently, they work differently. Scorsese has talked about the cumulative power of cinema, how a film’s momentum takes hold precisely because you’re locked into its duration. You don’t get that with television.

The choice of medium should be dictated by the filmmaker’s vision: how big the canvas needs to be, how many threads the story can genuinely hold, and “Is it cinematic?” A film like “Killers of the Flower Moon” wrestles with multiple perspectives and an entire community’s history. That’s a challenge, not a flaw, and it doesn’t automatically mean the answer is to stretch everything into eight episodes.