Martin Scorsese’s 91%-Rated Movie Is to Blame For His Ruined Relationships With Warner Bros

Summary:

• Martin Scorsese is now one of the most proclaimed directors of modern times with a bunch of Oscar-worthy movies under his belt, but once major creative differences came between the director and a cinematic giant leading to the end of their partnership relationships.
• Back in the 2000s Scorsese didn’t alter his big hit’s ending scenes as Warner Bros. had wanted him to, thus ruining the studio’s plan to turn the movie into a franchise.
• Despite the director’s tense relationships with Warner Bros., he found reliable partners in other major companies that helped him produce his latest commercially and critically successful movies.

It’s been decades since Martin Scorsese was proclaimed one of the best directors of all time — and to this day he doesn’t lose the ground having proved his status with last year’s masterpiece Killers of the Flower Moon starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone.

However, artistic genius often goes hand in hand with stubborn and intractable nature — and Scorsese’s ex colleagues from Warner Bros. had a big chance to see this with their own eyes.

Back in 2006, Scorsese released his epic crime thriller The Departed — the film eventually got to be commercially and critically acclaimed classic of the genre, earning almost $300 million in the box office with the initial budget of $90 million and taking home four Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing.

To many people’s surprise, the almost 20-year-old film to this day remains Scorsese’s one and only directorial win.

Before the film was released, Warner Bros. executives, who were working on the movie alongside Scorsese, were more than sure in The Departed’s immense success in the future — with a truly star-studded cast that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin and many others, the studio saw the upcoming film as a beginning for a potentially high-grossing franchise.

At this point those who got to see the film before may guess that Scorsese’s decision about the final scenes destroyed all of the Warner Bros.’s hopes and dreams.

The executives still had no chances for big changes in the film’s plot — Scorsese had come up with the disastrous ending before and wasn’t willing to follow the studio’s tastes at the expense of his own artistic vision.

Having seen how Scorsese killed all of the main characters without taking the studio’s advice, Warner Bros. ended its relationships with the proclaimed director after decades of team-work.

The breakup with a major film studio didn’t affect Scorsese’s career in any way though — later on he collaborated with Paramount Pictures for his high-grossing hits Shutter Island and Wolf of Wall Street, then worked with Netflix that eventually released his epic gangster film The Irishman.

Scorsese’s latest western crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon was also co-produced by Paramount and is now available to watch on Apple TV.