Famed auteur Martin Scorsese spent last week gallivanting around New York City, on the arm of Timothée Chalamet, while the two shot a Chanel ad amidst throngs of adoring fans. While candids from that production might’ve sent Twitter users’ hearts aflutter, it’s Scorsese’s other project that fans are really going wild over.
The director’s next film, Killers of the Flower Moon, has been hotly anticipated since before its source material, the 2017 non-fiction crime book by David Grann, was even published. The book’s manuscript caused an industry bidding war, and Scorsese was attached to direct the film shortly after its publication.
Over the last few years, Killers of the Flower Moon has become somewhat of a mythical work. The film, about a series of murders of residents of the Osage Nation in 1920, is due to be the first time that Scorsese pairs two of his muses, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, together. De Niro and DiCaprio have amassed enormous fanbases. Combine the two stars’ legions of followers with those who (rightfully) consider Scorsese to be one of the greatest directors of all time, and the film has had its audience basically built in before production began.
But such ravenous fanbases demand content. They will not be silenced until they are fed. Killers of the Flower Moon has had a glacially slow drip of promotional material; fans have been working with the same still of stars Lily Gladstone and DiCaprio almost two whole years. That image has become prolific on platforms like Twitter, becoming the calling card for any announcements about the film, upcoming movie previews, or release calendar changes—to the point that its ubiquity became a meme.
In an unprecedented move, the film’s streaming distributor, Apple TV+, fired back at the jokesters with a winking response on Thursday, following the exclusive CinemaCon premiere of the film’s trailer
“Begging the team behind ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ to release just, like, ONE other still,” journalist Scott Wampler tweeted, almost 10 days ago—echoing the complaints of many other cinephiles. Looks like someone at Apple TV+ had Wampler’s tweet bookmarked and ready to go for CinemaCon, because the brand’s account retweeted the sentiment Thursday with a new still attached. “Here’s one,” it replied. The streamer then dropped two more images, for good measure, under its first tweet, mitigating any further online criticism about “the same two stills being repeated over and over.”
Only having one available still from a film that is still very much in post-production is not exactly an unknown phenomenon. But in the digital age, when we want everything to be fresh, hot, new, and immediate—and to have it pounded into our face with the force of a firehose—Killers of the Flower Moon’s secrecy has certainly been notable. It’s even spoken to a new trend, where studios stay reluctant to release any proper promotional stills for a film until their official trailers are prepped and ready.
The same thing happened with 2022’s The Whale, which saw the same exact still of Brendan Fraser in his heinous fat suit inundating not just the Twittersphere, but the world at large. The anticipation surrounding both films has kept them in the cultural conversation, resulting in these photographs’ regurgitation in an endless cycle. And thus, they become memed just as much.
Whether the growing number of keyboard clowns, jesters, and jokesters are actually excited for Killers of the Flower Moon, or just enjoy dunking on it, is another matter entirely. But there’s no question that it has been great for grassroots marketing, especially now that the film’s trailer—which is due to drop sometime before its premiere at Cannes Film Festival next month—is tangible proof that the movie exists.
In retrospect, Killers of the Flower Moon managing to keep itself in the zeitgeist with only one measly photograph is a pretty impressive feat—Scorsese or no Scorsese. A single image has managed to generate legitimate excitement, even if a good portion of it has been teasing. You can be sure no one is going to forget how they first heard about Scorsese’s next masterpiece, though. As film programmer Screen Slate tweeted, “People who saw it, is The Still in the Killers of the Flower Moon trailer?”
