Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Martin Scorsese star in £46m ad for Chinese casino

 

Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Robert DeNiro earned $13m (£8.6m) for the film above. Or, rather, the extended version.

 

All three feature in the “The Audition”, a short film directed by Martin Scorsese, written by “Boardwalk Empire” creator Terence Winter and with an incredible production budget of $70m (£46m). 

 

With a crew like that, you’d have expected “The Audition” to be a shoo-in for Wednesday’s Academy Award nominations.

 

But it’s not really a short film at all. Instead, the much-decorated group of Hollywood royalty has been paid to work on a lavish ad for Studio City, the new Macau mega-casino owned by moguls Lawrence Ho and James Packer.

 

Despite its silver-screen dream team, the above trailer doesn't look likely to challenge the Wolf of Wall Street or Taxi Driver for a place in film history.

 

Yet with their lofty paycheques reportedly only covering two days' work, it’s not hard to work out what prompted the stars to get involved.

 

And while $70m may sound like a lot of money to drop on an advert, it pales in comparison to the $3.2bn Studio City reportedly cost to build. The resort bought rights to an “unrivalled portfolio” of DC Comics and Warner Bros Studios characters to base its many rides and attractions on.

 

It even features a 130-metre-high ferris wheel inside the building’s central tower.

 

Macau, China’s casino capital, has a reported gambling revenues seven times higher than Las Vegas with revenues of $45bn in 2014.