Matt Damon’s 10/10 Crime Thriller Is Officially Getting Whacked on Streaming

Martin Scorsese has made an awful lot of movies about gangsters, but it took him until 2006 to finally win the Academy Award for Best Director. By that point, he'd already given audiences Goodfellas, Casino and Mean Streets, so it wasn't exactly as though he had anything left to prove. But putting Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon and Jack Nicholson together in a Boston crime thriller turned out to be a pretty good idea, particularly when the result became one of the most successful movies of his career.

That movie is The Departed, and Scorsese's $291 million crime thriller is officially leaving HBO Max in the United States. The 2006 movie won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, finally giving Scorsese the Oscar that had eluded him for decades. Based on the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, the movie follows two men working undercover on opposite sides of Boston's criminal underworld.

Rookie cop Billy Costigan grew up in crime. That makes him the perfect mole, the man on the inside of the mob run by boss Frank Costello. It's his job to win Costello's trust and help his detective handlers bring Costello down. Meanwhile, SIU officer Colin Sullivan has everyone's trust. No one suspects he's Costello's mole. How these covert lives cross and collide is at the ferocious core of this. Three of the finest actors of all time are at the lead, alongside a cast of supporting players who would be more than capable of leading their own movies in any other situation.

The cast is led by DiCaprio (The Wolf of Wall Street) as Billy Costigan, alongside Damon (The Bourne Identity) as Colin Sullivan, Nicholson (The Shining) as Frank Costello, Mark Wahlberg (The Fighter) as Sergeant Sean Dignam, Martin Sheen (The West Wing) as Captain Oliver Queenan, Vera Farmiga (The Conjuring) as Dr. Madolyn Madden, Alec Baldwin (30 Rock) as Captain George Ellerby, and Ray Winstone (Sexy Beast) as Arnold French.

How Good Is 'The Departed?

The Departed remains one of Scorsese's most acclaimed movies, holding an excellent 91% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie was also a major commercial success, earning approximately $291 million worldwide against a reported $90 million production budget.

At the 79th Academy Awards, it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing, while Wahlberg received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. It was Scorsese's first Oscar win for directing, following previous nominations for movies including Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Gangs of New York.

The Departed is leaving HBO Max in the United States.