Martin Scorsese Net Worth

How much is Martin Scorsese worth?

About Martin Scorsese

Working in the film industry for over 50 years, Scorsese is an acclaimed film director who is most well known for his uniquely shot gangster movies with fast edits and rock n’ roll soundtracks. Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed are just a few that are now regarded as classics. Commonly working with the same set of actors, many have earned Academy Award nominations and wins under Scorsese’s direction.

Despite Scorsese’s dramatic and often dark movies, the director has produced several movies and directed documentaries about famed musicians including Bob Dylan and George Harrison, and he is known to have a funny bone as he heavily featured in a season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

After making a name for himself with Mean Streets, a gangster movie that thrust both Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro in to Hollywood, Scorsese has scored dozens of directorial jobs and in 1976, directed one of the greatest films of all time, Taxi Driver. The movie has been named culturally and historically significant by the US Library of Congress and is preserved in the National Film Registry. Not long after, Scorsese followed up the gritty New York love letter with Raging Bull, another De Niro , which is often referred to as Scorsese’s magnum opus.

One of his more recent classics is The Departed, in which Jack Nicholson gives one of his greatest performances of his career.

The movie helped Scorsese bag the Academy Award for Best Director, which is controversially his only Oscar despite having more than ten classics under his belt.

Though most of Scorsese’s movies have depressing subject matters, he agreed to play an exaggerated version of himself in season three of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, in which he casts Larry David as the villain in a fictionalized gangster movie. It is known as the best season of Curb Your Enthusiasm mostly for Larry David’s arguments over lines of dialogue with Scorsese.

Having a soft spot for rock music, not only does the director’s movies have soundtracks that are better than most rock records, but Scorsese has directed documentaries about Bob Dylan and George Harrison, and has even shot concert films for The Rolling Stones and The Band.

It’s Scorsese’s collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio that see most financial success, largely in part thanks to DiCaprio’s star power, as both The Departed and Shutter Island both made over $290 million, and The Aviator and Gangs of New York made a combined $400 million. The Wolf of Wall Street is Scorsese’s biggest hit at the global box office, making $392 million worldwide.

Though The Irishman only made $8 million in cinemas as it had a limited release, the movie was made for streaming on Netflix. The movie had not only Scorsese’s biggest budget, but one of the biggest budgets of all time outside of superhero movies, as it was rumored to cost up to $250 million to shoot due to its de-aging techniques.

As Scorsese was also an executive producer on the movie, it’s likely that his salary was a good chunk of that budget.

One of Scorsese’s highest salaries to date amusingly comes from shooting a commercial in the form of a 16 minute short film for Studio City Macau Resort and Casino. The resort gave Scorsese a budget of $70 million to direct his buddies Brad Pitt, De Niro, and DiCaprio in the glorified ad. The four men each received an estimated $13 million for less than two days on set.

Though gangster movies have had a variety of directors at the helm, few have returned to the genre as often as Scorsese, and few directors do it so well. Along with The Godfather, Scorsese changed the way gangster movies were seen by audiences as critics, as beforehand they were seen as schlocky movies with funny accents and silly gun shot sound effects. He turned them into prestigious, award winning films. Scorsese was even requested to direct The Godfather Pt. II by Francis Ford Coppola, but Scorsese turned it down due to having such a different style to Coppola and fearing that fans of the original would be disappointed.

Scorsese has a big hand in not just directing, but the whole process of filmmaking from pre-production to post, especially in the editing room, and that passion is a big part of his success. He is so passionate about the editing of the movie that when the MPAA told him he had to darken the shots in the final shoot-out in Taxi Driver so that it can get an R-rating, Scorsese stayed up all night drinking whisky with a pistol in his hand, with the intention of killing the MPAA employee who told him that. It was De Niro who eventually talked him out of it.

More than anything, Scorsese is so successful because he is so well respected, as actors are queuing up to work with his due to his statue. DiCaprio is on record as saying that Scorsese doesn’t do anything different to other directors on set, but because of his legacy, the whole cast and crew work that much harder.

He is so beloved that even directors will take up acting roles in his movie just to get the chance to work with him. In The Wolf of Wall Street alone, there are three directors who starred in the movie; Jon Favreau (director of Iron Man and Chef), Spike Jonze (director of Where The Wild Things Are and Being John Malkovich), and Rob Reiner (director of This Is Spinal Tap). Scorsese even convinced Daniel Day Lewis to come out of retirement for his role in Gangs of New York, as the actor gave up acting to become a cobbler in Italy.

Summing-Up

Scorsese’s biography is named Gangster Priest because those were the only two occupations available to him growing up, but he has become one of the greatest film directors of all time by creating compelling movies about those very themes. After 50 years of releasing classics, Martin Scorsese has an estimated net worth of $150 million. His upcoming project, Killers of the Flower Moon, a western based in Oklahoma in the 1920s, will reunite the director with DiCaprio and is set for release in 2021.