Few endings punch through cinema quite like Raging Bull's final dressing-room scene. Robert De Niro's Jake LaMotta, once a ferocious middleweight, is reduced to rehearsing an On the Waterfront monologue in a mirror, trying to summon the man he used to be.

Martin Scorsese filmed that wreckage in unforgiving black and white, and De Niro walked away with the Best Actor Oscar. Today, the 1980 drama ranks among their defining collaborations, a masterpiece filled with bruises that extend far beyond the boxing ring.

Astonishingly, the whole cinematic knockout nearly stayed on the ropes because Scorsese found its central sport painfully dull.

Robert De Niro kept approaching Martin Scorsese with the idea. The director kept declining. The reason was simple: Scorsese found boxing to be boring. In Peter Biskind’s 1998 book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Scorsese once explained the same.

“Even as a kid, I always thought that boxing was boring... It was something I couldn’t, wouldn’t grasp,” he said. His opinion of the sport itself never really changed.

Everything shifted after Scorsese suffered a serious health crisis in 1978. De Niro visited him in the hospital, still championing the project. Recovering and reassessing his life, the director began recognizing himself in LaMotta’s self-destructive impulses, as he later shared at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.

“I was lost in a way, so I had to start all over again. It was a rebirth in a way,” said the director.

De Niro trained as a boxer and gained significant weight for LaMotta’s later years. The film earned eight Oscar nominations, including a win for editor Thelma Schoonmaker. An unwanted boxing movie had become a career-defining knockout.

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And nearly five decades later, Scorsese is preparing another cinematic experiment, with considerably fewer boxing gloves.

Martin Scorsese is stepping into unfamiliar territory again, this time with snow, eerie hotels, and Leonardo DiCaprio. His upcoming film What Happens at Night adapts Peter Cameron's novel about an American married couple traveling to a remote European town to adopt a baby. DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence lead the cast, with Patricia Clarkson, Jared Harris, Welker White, and Mads Mikkelsen joining the strange pilgrimage.

Apple Original Films confirmed filming began in the Czech Republic in March 2026. The project is being made with STUDIOCANAL, with a screenplay by Patrick Marber. According to an October production listing, principal photography is finished, and the movie is in post-production. No confirmed release date has been announced.

The setting suggests another unsettling voyage through fear and fractured relationships. Mikkelsen reportedly plays a faith healer named Brother Emmanuel. Naturally, that is exactly the sort of hotel guest everyone hopes to encounter when the heating breaks.

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Would you have imagined Raging Bull without Scorsese? Let us know in the comments.