Few movies have covered the world of the casino as well as the 1995 movie Casino. It reunited the creative team behind the 1990 Oscar-winning film Goodfellas, with Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Martin Scorsese in particular back and working on the new film.

Lots of dream of casino billions, but in the story that the film tells, that dream inevitably goes awry. Scorsese based the story on a real-life story, but he had to change all the names of those involved for fear of legal problems with the movie. He might have found it easier staying at home and trying online casinos MT instead.

Whilst the film was based on the book by Nicholas Pileggi, the problem here was that the book hasn’t been published by the time the film came out. As such, a book is fact-checked and legal-checked before it can go on sale – as was the case with his earlier novel, Wise Guys (which formed the basis of Goodfellas). But because the film of Casino came before the book was released, it was the film that that bore the brunt of the legal checks that needed to be carried out.

That said, Universal Pictures was still keen to go ahead with the movie, and gave it the greenlight. It had signed Martin Scorsese up to a two-picture deal after the success of Goodfellas, and the first of those films had given the director his biggest ever box office hit: Cape Fear, which also starred Robert De Niro.

Scorsese was next going to do the film Clockers as part of that deal, but instead he dropped that project and it would be Spike Lee that would make that film in the end. Scorsese decided that Casino would be his next movie, and he duly headed to Las Vegas to shoot the film.

Scorsese and his team really wanted to authentically capture the world of Las Vegas casinos in the 1970s and 1980s, and that meant filming in an actual casino (although unsurprisingly, not every Vegas casino was open to the idea of the movie filming on their premises, given the violent content involved in the movie). They also did lots of location filming in and around the area as well.

The film made it into cinemas at the end of 1995 in the end, and it proved to be a decent hit, although not as successful as Cape Fear. It also didn’t earn the Oscar-attention that Goodfellas had attracted. But still, it remains a very well liked film, and few movies have done casinos better.