Martin Scorsese criticizes the film industry’s obsession with box office numbers

The New York Film Festival and the director took place last week Martin Scorsese he expressed his appreciation for the celebration, as well as his complaints about the film industry while he was there. IndieWire reported that Scorsese praised the festival for supporting cinema at a time when “cinema is devalued, humiliated, belittled on all sides, not necessarily on the business side but certainly on the art side.”

Scorsese elaborated, saying:

“Since the 1980s there has been a focus on numbers. It’s a little repulsive. The cost of a film is one thing. You understand that a film costs a certain amount, they at least expect to get the money back … Now the emphasis is on the numbers, the cost, the opening weekend, how much it did in the United States, how much it did in England, how much it made in Asia, how much it earned in the whole world, how many spectators it got. As a director and as a person who cannot imagine life without cinema, I always find it really offensive ”.

“I’ve always known that such considerations have no place at the New York Film Festival, and here’s the key to that too: there are no awards here. You don’t have to compete. You just have to love the cinema here ”.

Director Edgar Wright (Night of the Living Dead, Child Driver, Last night in Soho), an outspoken Scorsese lover, shared similar thoughts earlier this month during his BBC Maestro course (via Variety). Wright remembered it as his cult classic Scott Pellegrino against the world bombed over the opening weekend, yet it’s hardly considered a disappointment all these years later.

Wright said:

“I’ve told other directors this as who may have had an initial reaction similar to a movie like ‘Scott Pilgrim’ is that the three-day weekend isn’t the end of the story for any movie. People shouldn’t accept that idea. Evaluating movies by box office is like the soccer fan equivalent to movies. Most of my favorite films that are considered classics today were not considered hits in their day ”.

“You can point to hundreds of classic films, be it ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘The Big Lebowski’. So how a film goes in its first three days is never the end of the story, and the further we move away from that talk about box office numbers being the entirety of a film, the better. “

Scorsese is currently in post-production on his $ 200 million western film The killers of the flower moonhero Leonardo Dicaprio And Roberto De Niro. The film will be released in theaters and will be streamed on Apple TV + in 2023.