After a whirlwind of development, with the project moving from Paramount to STX Entertainment to Netflix, the decades-spanning mobster tale The Irishman is finally getting made. Netflix has officially given the greenlight to the Martin Scorsese film, which is based on Charles Brandt’s book, I Hear You Paint Houses. Production is currently set to begin during August of this year, with the picture receiving an as-yet-undetermined 2019 release date. The budget for the ensemble crime drama is set at $100 million.
As previously reported, Robert De Niro will star as Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, who officially worked for The International Brotherhood of Teamsters and carried out hits for the mob on the side. Amongst his many reported kills, Sheeran reportedly had ties to the deaths of Jimmy Hoffa and President Kennedy. The film will utilize CGI de-aging software to allow De Niro to portray Sheeran across decades of the man’s life. This will mark De Niro’s first film with Scorsese directing since 1995’s Casino.
No one is officially signed on to co-star in the picture yet, but the likes of Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel, Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, and Jack Nicholson have all been circling it for years. If Scorsese and Netflix can score most, if not all, of those men, we’ll be looking at an acting powerhouse of a crime film. Scorsese still has a number of other projects lined up beyond The Irishman, which includes the H.H. Holmes serial killer picture The Devil in the White City, the George Washington biopic The General, and the 1920s crime flick Killers of the Flower Moon.
