Scorsese Walked Away From Warner Bros Over This Now-Beloved Film

Back in 2006, Scorsese delivered The Departed, a gritty, star-stacked crime drama with Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, and Mark Wahlberg. The film was a massive hit by every metric — but not enough, it seems, for Warner Bros, who reportedly had their eyes on a sequel before the credits even rolled.

Let's run the facts:

• The Departed won four Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director — Scorsese's only directing win to date.
• It holds a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.5 on IMDb.
• The story, based loosely on the real-life Winter Hill Gang, ends with a definitive full stop — two of them, actually, with both DiCaprio and Damon's characters dead by the final scene.

That last detail? Warner Bros hated it.

According to Scorsese in a 2023 GQ interview, the studio didn't want a clean ending. They wanted a door left open — for sequels, spin-offs, or whatever other IP-milking strategy was popular at the time. In Scorsese's words:

"What they wanted was a franchise. It wasn't about a moral issue of a person living or dying."

The final straw came after a test screening that went exceptionally well with audiences. The studio execs? Still disappointed. Scorsese recalled:

"The studio guys walked out and they were very sad, because they just didn't want that movie.
They wanted the franchise. Which means: I can't work here anymore."

And that was it. The Departed marked the end of Scorsese's relationship with Warner Bros. From then on, he took his films elsewhere — Shutter Island with Paramount, The Irishman with Netflix, Killers of the Flower Moon with Apple.

Notably, none of those studios tried to force a sequel into Silence or spin-off Taxi Driver: Origins. A small miracle in modern Hollywood.

So the next time someone calls The Departed "one of the last great studio movies," remember: the studio didn't even want it. They wanted a franchise. Scorsese gave them an actual movie instead — and walked away.