Martin Scorsese Movies We'll Never Get To See

Martin Scorsese is responsible for some of the greatest movies of the past 50 years. He's directed seedy crime dramas like Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, and The Departed. He's made sweeping historical epics like Hugo, The Aviator, and The Last Temptation of Christ. And he's responsible for films that are a little bit of both, such as Goodfellas, The Irishman, and Gangs of New York.

But as with every great filmmaker, the list of classic movies that could've been but never were is at least as long. Like all of them, Scorsese has decades of passion projects that fate stood in the way of, ideas that turned into something totally different by the time they reached the screen, and for-hire jobs that either he or his producers decided he just wasn't right for, even though his fans might strongly disagree. Scorsese's never made a bad movie, so it's easy to imagine any one of these films might've been great. At the very least, they certainly would've been interesting. Here are just a few of the most tantalizing possibilities.

Scorsese made his feature debut with the microbudget, autobiographical Who's That Knocking at My Door?, which would form the blueprint for his mainstream breakthrough with Mean Streets. But around the same time, he was also working on a very different kind of crime movie, one that might've pointed his career in a whole different direction.

First-time producer Leonard Kastle picked up Scorsese to helm The Honeymoon Killers, a low-budget exploitation thriller based on the true story of two lovers who solicited murder victims through personals ads. Scorsese recalled his brief, disastrous shoot to Richard Schickel in Conversations with Scorsese, saying, "Instead of just making the film, I was trying to make a reputation. And I twisted and turned it in different ways stylistically. I tried to make it something it shouldn't have been." As Scorsese explained, he was trying to craft a film in the vein of Carl Dreyer, the austere Swedish director who made The Passion of Joan of Arc. That's the last thing you'd want for a lurid exploitation flick. He adds, "I was fired from that after one week, and rightly so."

The Honeymoon Killers recovered. In fact, it's become a cult classic. And Scorsese would return to the B-movie salt mines again with another true story of criminal lovers in Boxcar Bertha. But it's fascinating to imagine how differently his career might've gone. Would he still have become the prestigious filmmaker he is today, or would he have continued turning his gifts to schlockier fare?

Scorsese eventually decided to follow up Taxi Driver with the musical New York, New York, a movie that wasn't particularly big with critics. The director might've had better luck if he'd taken another of the scripts that Scorsese on Scorsese says he was offered at the time, one that would've taken him to another classic genre.

Anne Edwards' novel Haunted Summer finds a story behind the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that's just as fascinating as the novel itself, looking at the debauched summer Shelley spent with two of the other great poets of her era, Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

Scorsese would've been an excellent fit for the project, which was eventually completed in 1988. He would go on to prove his unique talent at capturing the Victorian era with The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York. And despite tantalizing glimpses in movies like After Hours, Cape Fear, and Shutter Island, Scorsese has never fully tried his hand at horror outside an episode of the Amazing Stories anthology series. 

But that's not for lack of interest. One of his favorite movies ever made is Peeping Tom, a precursor to Psycho, and he's talked at length about his love for the Shelley-ish Gothic horror of producer Val Lewton and Hammer studios. It's easy to imagine the masterpiece he could've made out of the creation of Frankenstein, but sadly, that's all we can do.

Bonnie and Clyde star Warren Beatty had a long-developing dream to bring his childhood hero, Dick Tracy, to the big screen. Beatty had grown up on Chester Gould's comics pitting the trenchcoated cop against colorful villains like Flattop and the Mole, bad guys who inspired the modern supervillain. And he'd been pushing to play Dick for almost 20 years before he finally got his chance in 1990. Beatty would end up directing the movie himself, but he courted some of Hollywood's biggest talents for the job, including Steven Spielberg, Walter Hill ... and Martin Scorsese.

You have to wonder how different Dick Tracy could've been with Scorsese at the helm. The director famously has no time for the current generation of comic book movies, but comics inspired some of his earliest creative pursuits as a kid, and many of his operatic epics have a disinterest in subtlety on par with superhero stories. Would he have found a middle ground between Gould's cartoon crooks and the gritty realism of Goodfellas? Or would he have applied his love and mastery of color to create something like the saturated Sunday funnies look of the final product? Would he have gotten to work with Al Pacino — who plays boss of bosses, Big Boy Caprice — decades before The Irishman? We'll never know, but that won't stop us asking.

New York, New York was a box office bomb that nearly killed Scorsese's career just as it was getting started. But that didn't scare him off considering another musical project. Then again, it may be the reason he never finished it.

Throughout his career, news has repeatedly resurfaced that Scorsese's plan to film the life of George Gershwin, a composer who was instrumental in popularizing jazz with compositions like Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess. Scorsese has worked on scripts with his frequent collaborator Paul Schrader and Six Degrees of Separation author John Guare. Scorsese on Scorsese described one especially intriguing mutation of the project as "a Paul Schrader script in the stylized mode of his Mishima" — referencing the writer-director's film on the life of Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima — intercut with gorgeous, fantastical scenes from Gerswhin's writings. Film Comment summarizes it more concretely, writing, "Lavish production numbers of Gershwin's works were to be related to scenes from his life as discussed by Gershwin on a psychologist's couch."

It's tantalizing to imagine what kind of fantasies Scorsese could spin out of Gershwin's work, which defined New York City in the popular imagination as much as Scorsese himself. But until those rumors resurface yet again, we'll just have to leave it up to our imaginations.

After the success of Goodfellas put bigger budgets in his grasp, Scorsese proved he was the master of period pieces, with an eye for luxurious beauty, gritty realism, and details so specific you know they have to be accurate. Part of that comes from his childhood growing up on the Cinemascope spectacles of the '50s, but he's never quite followed in their footsteps with a true sword-and-sandals epic.

He did come close, though. Theodora would've skated past the first Roman Empire to look at the founding of the less-filmed Byzantine Empire. It would've been a true rags-to-riches story, about the titular historical figure who went from sex work to Emperor Justinian's wife to one of history's most powerful women.

And nothing but the best was good enough for the script, written by Gore Vidal, a legend in many fields including novels (Myra Breckinridge), nonfiction (Lincoln), and screenwriting (Caligula, plus an uncredited rewrite on Ben-Hur). A 1994 interview with the Los Angeles Times asked Vidal, "What's holding it up?" The author responded, "We're waiting on new technology, to show battle scenes without Ben-Hur prices. ... Marty says that seven years is about right to get a picture made nowadays." Well, it's been over 25 years, and still, we've got nothing,

The Snowman was a universal laughingstock ever since the first poster debuted, with a childish letter to "Mister Police" and a doodle of a hilariously glum snowman. And the laughter didn't let up once the critics actually saw the dang thing, especially when it became apparent the actors were mispronouncing the name of protagonist Harry Hole ("hu-luh" in Norwegian) in the most hilarious way possible.

But it all could've been different. Director Tomas Alfredson couldn't rise above the rushed schedule and heavy-handed production, despite his experience helming the cult classics Let the Right One In and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. But even he's no Scorsese. Who is?

And that's exactly who the producers initially went for. But Jo Nesbø, author of the original novel, told News in English the producers were "impatient and see that it will take time to wait for Scorsese." That checks out. In fact, they were so impatient that Alfredson had hardly any time to finish the job once he came aboard. Maybe Scorsese knew a sinking ship when he saw one. But even if the project was doomed no matter who took the reins, we have to imagine the master would've done something better with it. How could it be any worse?