Warner Bros. Wanted Martin Scorsese to Not Kill Off One of the Characters in THE DEPARTED for a Sequel
Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was a great film, and it came to an end with so many of the main characters being killed off. Well, Warner Bros. didn’t like the idea of killing off all of the main characters and they wanted the filmmaker to spare one of two main characters so that they could make a sequel.
During an interview with GQ, Scorsese revealed: "What they wanted was a franchise. It wasn't about a moral issue of a person living or dying." The director went on to say that while the audiences at the initial test screenings loved the way the film played out, people from the studio were "very sad, because they just didn't want that movie."
The two main characters in the film were Matt Damon as Colin Sulivan, a mole for the Irish mob and Leonardo DiCaprio as William Costagan Jr., who was an undercover officer. After a series of twisty, wild, violent events, the film ends with both characters being killed.
He went on to explain: "They wanted the franchise. Which means: I can't work here anymore." The director went on to make Shutter Island with Paramount Pictures, which he describes as his "last studio film." Since then, he has gone out looking for independent funding for his movie, though Paramount still distributes them theatrically.
Now, the studio could’ve made a sequel with Mark Wahlberg’s character, Sergeant Digman, who survived the ordeal. He previously pitched the studio on a sequel with screenwriter William "Bill" Monahan and their concept would have hopefully featured Robert De Niro and Brad Pitt, but it never panned out.
When talking about the pitch, Wahlberg said: "Let's just say the pitch didn't go very well. [Bill] didn't really have anything fleshed out, but he's the kind of guy you just trust to go and write something. And so when we were working on the script for Cocaine Cowboys and American Desperado, [I] said, 'Bill, just go write.' They like to have things well thought out and planned."
The actor added: “He assumed the studio would have the same response that everyone else did and let him go figure it out. But they like to have things well-thought out and planned, so that pitch didn’t go well.”
As for the idea, the movie is said to have been set "before, during, and after the action of the first film." In the end, The Departed is a film that stands on its own, and that’s perfectly fine! It really didn’t need a sequel.