Leonardo DiCaprio is a frequent collaborator with esteemed director Martin Scorsese, but he looks unlikely to beat a record set by the director’s work with Robert De Niro.
For almost 60 years, Scorsese has worked with some of the best actors in the business, including Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Willem Dafoe, and Daniel Day Lewis. However, the director’s best known for his frequent collaborations with De Niro and DiCaprio. Scorsese’s movies with De Niro helped to define the New Hollywood era of the 1970s, and its unofficial resurgence in the 1990s.
Scorsese and De Niro have made 10 movies together over 50 years, from Mean Streets in 1973 to the Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon in 2023. After parting ways with De Niro in 1995, Martin Scorsese began working with Leonardo DiCaprio on 2002’s Gangs of New York, and they made six movies together in a 21-year period. De Niro and DiCaprio’s most prolific periods working with Martin Scorsese both cover two decades, but the Gangs of New York star is currently lagging behind the Taxi Driver actor by four movies, and it may be difficult for him to catch up.
Leonardo DiCaprio Likely Won’t Match De Niro’s Record Of 10 Movies With Scorsese
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro made eight movies together between 1973 and 1995, a hit rate that Leonardo DiCaprio never managed to beat. DiCaprio and Scorsese made six movies together between 2002 and 2023, and so he’s already at a disadvantage to De Niro. Scorsese has also made other movies with other actors during both these periods, but he was much more prolific and in-demand during his collaboration with De Niro. This allowed him to make films like Alice Don’t Live HereAnymore and After Hours while still clocking up an impressive number of collaborations with De Niro.
Of course, Scorsese and De Niro were much younger men back then, and the cinema landscape was markedly different during the heyday of their working relationship. This has meant that some of Scorsese’s most recent movies, like The Irishman or Silence, have faced an uphill struggle to get made, considerably slowing down his output. Meanwhile, Leonardo DiCaprio’s next movie with Paul Thomas Anderson, so he might not be available for Scorsese’s next film. Ultimately, time is against both Scorsese and DiCaprio to match De Niro’s 10 movies, but their collaborations have made a bigger impact than mere point-scoring
How Leonardo DiCaprio’s Scorsese Movies Compare To Robert De Niro’s
As good as Martin Scorsese’s movies with Leonard DiCaprio are, none of them feel like they have the cultural impact of a Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. The closest they come is probably Wolf of Wall Street, a movie that exposes the greed and entitlement at the heart of America’s financial sector, making it more culturally relevant in the years after its 2013 release. Critically speaking, DeNiro’s collaborations with Scorsese score stronger on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, but not by much.
Robert DeNiro’s ten Scorsese movies have an average critic score of 80%, while DiCaprio’s six movies have an 82% average. It’s a testament to the strength of both of Scorsese’s creative collaborations, from a critical perspective. Interestingly, the movies that Martin Scorsese made with Leonardo DiCaprio performed better at the Oscars, winning nine Academy Awards compared to De Niro and Scorsese’s three:
The Departed, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio was the movie that finally won Martin Scorsese a Best Director Oscar. However, at the time, it was suspected that this was less down to the film, and more down to the fact that Scorsese’s collaborations with Robert DeNiro were criminally overlooked by the Academy.
