Martin Scorsese Slams the Film Industry's Obsession With Box Office Numbers
Last week, the New York Film Festival took place, and director Martin Scorsese 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 championing filmmaking at a time when “cinema is devalued, demeaned, belittled from all sides, not necessarily the business side but certainly the art.”
Scorsese elaborated, saying:
“Since the ’80s, there’s been a focus on numbers. It’s kind of repulsive. The cost of a movie is one thing. Understand that a film costs a certain amount, they expect to at least get the amount back… The emphasis is now on numbers, cost, the opening weekend, how much it made in the U.S.A., how much it made in England, how much it made in Asia, how much it made in the entire world, how many viewers it got. As a filmmaker, and as a person who can’t imagine life without cinema, I always find it really insulting.”
“I’ve always known that such considerations have no place at the New York Film Festival, and here’s the key also with this: There are no awards here. You don’t have to compete. You just have to love cinema here.”
Director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, Last Night In Soho), an outspoken Scorsese lover, shared similar thoughts earlier this month during his BBC Maestro course (via Variety). Wright recalled how his cult classic Scott Pilgrim vs. the World bombed over its opening weekend, and yet it’s hardly considered a disappointment all these years later.
Wright said:
“I’ve said this to other filmmakers since who’ve maybe had a similar initial reaction to a film like ‘Scott Pilgrim’ did, is that the three-day weekend is not the end of the story for any movie. People shouldn’t buy into that idea. Rating films by their box office is like the football fan equivalent to films. Most of my favorite films that are considered classics today were not considered hits in their time.”
“You can point to hundreds of classic movies, whether it’s ‘Citizen Kane’ or ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘The Big Lebowski.’ So how a film does in its first three days is never the end of the story, and the further we get away from that discourse about box office numbers being the totality of a movie, the better.”
Scorsese is currently in post-production on his $200 million Western drama Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. The film will be released in theaters and will stream on Apple TV+ in 2023.