Between theCoen brothers’The Ballad of Buster ScruggsandAlfonso Cuarón’sRoma, Netflix has become a bit of a director’s playground these days. But that doesn’t mean you’re always stuck watching these films on a laptop screen. (Not that there’s anythingwrong with that.) WithRomaalready in the middle of a theatrical run,THRreports that the streaming service’s next high-profile original film,Martin Scorsese’sThe Irishman, is also due for a big-screen run before it hits Netflix.
That is, according to starRobert De Niro, who noted at the Marrakech Film Festival that Netflix would handleThe Irishman"the way it should be", which doesn’t sound at all like a threat.
“We’ve talked about it with Netflix," De Niro said. “They are going to do a presentation of our film the way it should be, in a theater, in certain venues, the best theatrical venues there can be. How they resolve it is, in the beginning, they will show it on the big screen, we’re talking about big venues where it would play, where it should play, and what happens after that I’m not sure.”
The Irishman, based on Charles Brandt’s bookI Heard You Paint Houses, is the ninth collaboration between De Niro and Scorsese, who first joined forces on 1973’sMean Streets. For their latest, De Niro stars as Frank “The Irishman” Sheehan, a labor union official and mob hitman with ties to the death of Jimmy Hoffa. In his first film directed by Scorsese, Oscar-winnerAl Pacinois set to play Hoffa, alongsideAnna Paquin,Bobby Cannavale, andJoe Pesciin his first on-screen role since 2010.
Part of the production process includes aging some of the characters down digitally up to five decades, a large chunk of the hard-to-find $140 million budget that Netflix is paying the tab for. “Marty wanted to do this as best as it has been done to this point to make us look younger,” De Niro said.
The Irishmanwrapped filmingin March and is on track to premiere in the back half of 2019.
