[7] The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cameron Diaz, along with Jim Broadbent, John C. Reilly, Henry Thomas, Stephen Graham, Eddie Marsan, Brendan Gleeson, and Liam Neeson in supporting roles.

The film is set in 1863, when a long-running Catholic–Protestant feud erupts into violence, just as an Irish immigrant group is protesting the threat of conscription during the Civil War.

In the 1846 slum of the Five Points, two rival gangs, the Anglo-Protestant Confederation of American Natives, led by William "Bill the Butcher" Cutting, and the Irish Catholic immigrant Dead Rabbits, led by "Priest" Vallon, engage in their final battle to determine which faction will hold sway over the territory.

An old acquaintance, Johnny Sirocco, familiarizes him with the local clans of gangs, all of whom pay tribute to Bill, who remains in control of the territory.

Amsterdam gains Bill's confidence and becomes his protégé, involving him in the dealings of corrupt Tammany Hall politician William M. Tweed.

Bill sends corrupt Irish policeman and former Dead Rabbit Mulraney to investigate, but Amsterdam garrotes him to death and hangs his body in the square.

The Civil War draft riots break out just as the gangs are preparing to fight, and Union Army soldiers are deployed to control the rioters.

As the rival gangs fight, cannon fire from ships is directed into Paradise Square, interrupting their battle shortly before it begins.

Amsterdam buries the knife next to his father in a cemetery in Brooklyn, erecting a makeshift headstone with the name William Cutting over it now alongside the actual tombstone of Priest Vallon.

As Amsterdam and Jenny leave, the skyline changes as modern New York City is built over the next century, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center, and the cemetery becomes overgrown and forgotten.

At the time, he had noticed there were parts of his neighborhood that were much older than the rest, including tombstones from the 1810s in Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, cobblestone streets and small basements located under more recent large buildings; this sparked Scorsese's curiosity about the history of the area: "I gradually realized that the Italian-Americans weren't the first ones there, that other people had been there before us.

Cocks recalled they had considered Malcolm McDowell in the lead role and framing the narrative with quotations from Bruce Springsteen, but otherwise they intended to keep the period vernacular authentic.

[9] At the time, Scorsese was a young director without prestige; by the end of the decade, with the success of crime films such as Mean Streets (1973), about his old neighborhood, and Taxi Driver (1976), he was a rising star.

In June 1977, producer Alberto Grimaldi ran a two-page ad in Daily Variety, announcing the film's production with Scorsese set to direct.

[11] However, Universal transferred the rights to the project to Disney in 1997, whose then-chairman Joe Roth turned down the film due to its excessive violence, which was "not appropriate for a Disney-themed movie".

[15][11] In order to create the sets that Scorsese envisioned, the production was filmed at the large Cinecittà Studio in Rome, Italy.

Production designer Dante Ferretti recreated over a mile of mid-nineteenth century New York buildings, consisting of a five-block area of Lower Manhattan, including the Five Points slum, a section of the East River waterfront including two full-sized sailing ships, a thirty-building stretch of lower Broadway, a patrician mansion, and replicas of Tammany Hall, a church, a saloon, a Chinese theater, and a gambling casino.

The film's voice coach, Tim Monich, resisted using a generic Irish brogue and instead focused on distinctive dialects of Ireland and Great Britain.

To develop the unique, lost accents of the Yankee "Nativists" such as Daniel Day-Lewis's character, Monich studied old poems, ballads, newspaper articles (which sometimes imitated spoken dialect as a form of humor) and the Rogue's Lexicon, a book of underworld idioms compiled by New York's police commissioner, so that his men would be able to tell what criminals were talking about.

An important piece was an 1892 wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reciting four lines of a poem in which he pronounced the word "Earth" as "Uth", and the "a" of "an" nasal and flat, like "ayan".

[8][12][17][18] Scorsese strongly defended his artistic vision on issues of taste and length while Weinstein fought for a streamlined, more commercial version.

The official justification was after the September 11 attacks, certain elements of the picture may have made audiences uncomfortable; the film's closing shot is a view of modern-day New York City, complete with the World Trade Center's towers, despite them having been destroyed by the attacks over a year before the film's release.

The rest of the selections included on the soundtrack album are a mix of contemporary pop and world music compositions and tunes from mid-nineteenth century Ireland.

[29] As early as 1839, Mayor Philip Hone said: "This city is infested by gangs of hardened wretches" who "patrol the streets making night hideous and insulting all who are not strong enough to defend themselves.

The effect is to freeze ethno-cultural rivalries over the course of three decades and portray them as irrational ancestral hatreds unaltered by demographic shifts, economic cycles and political realignments.

[34] The original target release date was December 21, 2001, in time for the 2001 Academy Awards but the production overshot that goal as Scorsese was still filming.

After negotiations between several parties, including the interests of DiCaprio, Weinstein and DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg, the decision was made on economic grounds: DiCaprio did not want to face a conflict of promoting two movies opening against each other; Katzenberg was able to convince Weinstein that the violence and adult material in Gangs of New York would not necessarily attract families on Christmas.

[6] Losses by Miramax Films were offset that year by the success of Chicago (2002), the musical, whose domestic box office zoomed to $170 million and which captured a Best Picture Oscar.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Though flawed, the sprawling, messy Gangs of New York is redeemed by impressive production design and Day-Lewis's electrifying performance.

[38] Roger Ebert praised the film but believed it fell short of Scorsese's best work, while his At the Movies co-host Richard Roeper called it a "masterpiece" and declared it a leading contender for Best Picture.