After years in development hell, The Irishman is finally coming to Netflix. The Martin Scorsese movie got a limited cinema release throughout November, but is now coming to all subscribers of the streaming platform.
The release date of The Irishman on Netflix worldwide is Wednesday, November 27, with the 210-minute movie expected to be released at one minute past midnight PT (3.01 a.m. ET).
This comes after the film had the biggest cinematic rollout of any Netflix film so far—although due to Netflix's policy of not sharing viewing figures or cinema box offices, we do not know how successful these screenings were.
However, we do know that this Netflix release comes more than a decade after Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro started working on the project that became The Irishman. Speaking at a press conference before the London premiere of the movie, Scorsese said that the pair were first given the book the film is based on (Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses) in 2007.
At the time, the pair were working on a film that was to be titled The Winter of Frankie Machine, but then they decided to merge that film with the story of I Heard You Paint Houses about the mysterious death of Jimmy Hoffa (played in The Irishman by Al Pacino).
The first script for this film that became The Irishman was delivered in 2009, but it has taken a decade for the film to be released. Why? According to De Niro: "It was a matter of getting everybody's schedules to line up."
However, despite Scorsese being behind some of the all-time great gangster films, and that this would be his first film with De Niro since Casino in 1995, they could not get anyone to finance the film. De Niro added: "We had no backers, no people really interested in the idea."
However, they eventually decided to do a reading of the script in 2012, with Pacino, De Niro and Joe Pesci playing their parts in front of a room full of studio people Scorsese was trying to get to back the film.
Producer Jane Rosenthal said of this: "The reading of the script was right before [Scorsese] left to go do Silence. We had this one opportunity to get everyone together. We taped a reading and I personally believed that was all we would have of The Irishman because it was so difficult to get financing. And then when everybody heard it, there was a new energy , but Marty went on to to shoot Silence. So we had another delay. A good one."
According to The Guardian, Paramount and STX bought the rights to the film when it was finally ready to be made in 2016 for $50 million, only for Netflix to buy it from them in February 2017 after Silence lost money at the box office.
The Irishman is released on November 27 on Netflix
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
