Martin Scorsese stopped working with Warner Bros after 2006's The Departed. The Goodfellas director had a very specific reason for this.

Warning: Spoilers for The Departed ahead.

Speaking to GQ, Scorsese claimed that Warner Bros wanted to make The Departed into a franchise. Furthermore, the studio wanted to keep either Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon's characters alive for future installments.

“What they wanted was a franchise. It wasn't about a moral issue of a person living or dying,” Scorsese revealed. “The studio guys walked out and they were very sad, because they just didn't want that movie.”

The Departed is a crime film that takes place in Boston. It revolves around a mob boss, Frank Costelloe (Jack Nicholson), who plants a spy, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), in the Massachusetts State Police. Meanwhile, the police send a cop (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) to infiltrate Costello's mob. The two cross paths and it's a race to discover the identity of the other.

Martin Scorsese's Departed film is a remake of the Japanese film, Infernal Affairs. Weirdly enough, the film spawned two more sequels, making it a franchise. Perhaps Warner Bros was hoping for a different kind of franchise than the one that the Japanese films were.

Coming up, Scorsese will release Killers of the Flower Moon. The film stars The Departed star Leonardo DiCaprio as Ernest Burkhart. Killers of the Flower Moon follows the string of murders in the Osage Nation in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Brendan Fraser, John Lithgow, and Jesse Plemons also star in the film.