Yea well, didn't Scorsese pan streaming services as bad for cinema? Guess it doesn't matter when the money is there.
He knew he wasn't going to get his next movie done with traditional Hollywood financing, he said it
here and his latest movies had budget problems. One could think "come on, it's Martin fucking Scorsese doing a mafia movie with both DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci on board and it's about Jimmy Hoffa, why would anyone willing to produce that?" Well, production companies nowadays have shareholders to please and focus on profitability, not risks.
Wolf Of Wall Street got into
money laundering / embezzlment problems, they even
got fined for that. And regarding Silence, his last movie before The Irishman, he had a more humble budget and it still
bombed at box office. Also Scorsese is known for being a control freak, having a say in every aspect of his movies and regularly fight producers about final cut, editing and casting choices. From a producer perspective, he's an uncompromising pain in the ass and a living director god which can become extremely hard to manage during a feature production.
That's why he went to Netflix, they don't really care about doing financial hits they just want top poster content to reap subscriptions. He could have gone to Amazon as well, they're known to litteraly throw hundreds of millions to people and don't give a single look during production (that's why Refn's surrealist and weird Too Old To Die Young got done there). That's pretty much a "give me your money and check results afterwards" deal a guy like Scorsese would seek, doing his vision while not being bothered by studio executives breathing down his neck during the production.
And it's just my opinion, but I think that's why he lately got so salty about Marvel, he just doesn't understand why nowadays Marvel franchise flicks got $200m budget on a whim when he has to struggle and compromise to get a movie done. He's one of the old dudes who started the
New Hollywood thing, when the industry shifted from producer movies to director movies. A cycle which is, quite ironically, happening again with Marvel heavily producing movies with throwaway yesmen directors who have almost no say in anything besides how their name is spelled on the poster. History repeating itself, or to quote The Irishman, "it is what it is".