Did you hear Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour while trying to watch Martin Scorsese’s latest movie? You aren’t alone.
Early on in Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a quiet moment between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the woman he will eventually marry, Osage heiress Molly (Lily Gladstone). The absorbing way Scorsese stages the drama makes it clear that this relationship will not end well, but the soundtrack is strangely twinkling, as if this were the start of a grand romance. Then the lyrics kicked in:
…karma is my boyfriend
Karma is a god
Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend
Karma’s a relaxing thought
Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?
I was not, in fact, hearing the late, great Robbie Robertson’s score for Killers of the Flower Moon — I was getting sound bleed from Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour playing next door. And I would continue to get that bleed throughout Killers, because while “Karma” marks the end of The Eras Tour’s set list, the film immediately started running again. At 169 minutes long, it’s only 37 minutes shorter than Scorsese’s epic, one of the few currently playing movies that get anywhere near the drama’s 206-minute run time.
Through conversations with friends and colleagues, posts on social media, and collected observations of theater layouts and showtimes, I learned that I am far from alone.
