Martin Scorsese and William Monahan remaking The Gambler

The Departed team of director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan are turning their attention to another remake: 1974's The Gambler .

Scorsese aficionados will be unsurprised to learn that the pair want their Departed leading man Leonardo DiCaprio to star.

The Hollywood Reporter states that the pair are developing the remake, though taking Scorsese's growing to-do list into account ( Silence , The Wolf Of Wall Street ), it's not clear when we can actually expect this.

The original Gambler starred James Caan as an English professor who's secretly caught in the grip of a gambling addiction, which kind of undercuts all those inspirational vibes he's been sending out to his students.

Czech filmmaker Karel Reisz ( Saturday Night And Sunday Morning , The French Lieutenant's Woman ) directed the original.

It sounds like it's the kind of role DiCaprio has made his own: a decent-at-heart bloke taken to breaking point by some demon or another.

And he's hardly likely to say no to his old mucker Scorsese, having starred in four out of his five last features.

We'll keep our ear to the ground on this one, which will no doubt gather pace if D-Cappz signs on. After all, the last time these guys got together for a remake, it didn't turn out too bad, eh?

Martin Scorsese's next, Hugo , is set to open on 2 December 2011.

Matt Maytum is the former Editor of Total Film magazine. Over the past decade, Matt has worked in various roles for TF online and in print, including at GamesRadar+. Bucket-list-ticking career highlights have included reporting from the set of Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as covering Comic-Con, TIFF and the Sundance Film Festival.