What 'The Departed' Franchise Could Have Looked like

Even though his resume of all-time classics spans longer than most directors’ entire careers, Martin Scorsese had to wait until relatively recently to take home his first Academy Award wins for Best Director and Best Picture for the 2006 action crime thriller The Departed. It couldn’t have been a more deserving victory, with its genuine complexity and dark sense of humor, The Departed did for Boston crime movies what Goodfellas did for New York mafia flicks. Although The Departed closes the loop on its own story (as only a few characters survive the events of the film), Warner Bros. had originally pressured Scorsese into turning the series into a franchise. There’s a very different world out there where The Departed was the first installment in what could have become a blockbuster saga.