Martin Scorsese railed against box office numbers during a recent appearance at the New York Film Festival (via IndieWire). The Oscar-winning filmmaker called the industry’s obsession with box office grosses both “repulsive” and “really insulting.” 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.”
“Since the ’80s, there’s been a focus on numbers. It’s kind of repulsive,” Scorsese said. “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.”
Scorsese added, “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.”
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Edgar Wright, an outspoken Scorsese lover, shared similar thoughts earlier this month during his BBC Maestro course. 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.
“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,” Wright said. “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.”
Wright added, “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.
