Leonardo DiCaprio’s Helen Mirren-Inspired Martin Scorsese Masterpiece Just Hit Streaming

Heads up: if you somehow missed The Wolf of Wall Street the first dozen times it circled cable and streaming, Netflix just dropped it — and it is not sticking around. It landed today and vanishes at the end of the month. Yes, it’s the full three-hour joyride of money, ego, and quaaludes. Plan accordingly.

Streaming window alert

Leonardo DiCaprio’s turn as Jordan Belfort hit Netflix on December 1, 2025, and it’s gone after December 31. That’s a tight window for a three-hour movie, but if you’re in the mood for maximum chaos, you’ve got time.

Why Wolf still bites

Martin Scorsese built this thing like a modern-day circus of excess — think the spirit of the 1979 movie Caligula, just dressed in pinstripes and penny stocks. The idea was to show American decadence with the same fall-from-grace energy you associate with ancient empires. DiCaprio pushed to keep the movie a hard R, not a sanded-down version, so the debauchery and moral rot didn’t get cleaned up on the way to release. The result: wall-to-wall bad decisions, filmed with a purposely chaotic style to match Belfort’s drug-fueled headspace.

The Academy noticed (five nominations), and audiences definitely did. The Wolf of Wall Street is still Scorsese’s biggest box office hit worldwide at $407 million, off a $100 million budget.

DiCaprio and Scorsese: the long game

Their creative partnership kicked off in 2002 and hasn’t really taken a breath since. Fun bit of film-world matchmaking: Robert De Niro set the introduction in motion after working with a young DiCaprio on This Boy’s Life. DiCaprio has said Scorsese showed him how deep the craft goes — and that the collaboration helped re-energize the director. Two decades later, here’s the track record:

• Gangs of New York (2002) fired up the partnership that’s now cleared $1.6+ billion worldwide across multiple films.
• They ran the table on prestige and genre: The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, and, of course, The Wolf of Wall Street.
• Wolf alone did $407 million globally and remains Scorsese’s top-grosser.

The latest chapter: Killers of the Flower Moon

In 2023, Scorsese, DiCaprio, and De Niro reunited for Killers of the Flower Moon — a three-plus-hour historical drama that cost north of $200 million and focuses on the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma. If you went in expecting a tidy procedural, the movie leans instead into the relationship at its center and the rot underneath it. Big canvas, heavy subject, very intentionally paced.

Jodie Foster’s take: great movie, wrong format?

Not everyone thinks the theatrical cut was the ideal delivery system. At the Marrakech International Film Festival, Jodie Foster floated that Killers of the Flower Moon might have been even stronger as an eight-hour limited series, mainly because a longer format could have dug deeper into the Native American experience at the heart of the story. Her argument is less hot take, more practical reality of how we watch long, dense narratives now — and she would know. She just headlined True Detective: Night Country, which pulled in a franchise-best 12.7 million average viewers and landed her an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress.

'You’re able to tell eight-hour stories, or five-season stories, where you can explore every angle in a way that you could never in a feature. I love the freedom of that.'

Whether you agree or not, it’s a fair question for this moment: do sprawling historical dramas play better with the breathing room of streaming, or do they need the focus (and the pressure) of a theatrical cut?

So, should you rewatch Wolf right now?

If you haven’t seen it since 2013, it’s worth revisiting — not just for the meme scenes, but to see how shockingly current it still feels about money worship and consequence-free power. The satire hasn’t aged; it just hits a little closer.

Are you queuing up The Wolf of Wall Street on Netflix before it rotates out? Does DiCaprio’s portrait of excess still land for you, or has the culture caught up to it? Tell me where you’re at on it.