The iconic Hollywood director Martin Scorsese said that the emphasis on how much a film has made in its opening weekend is 'repulsive'.
The legendary Hollywood filmmaker Martin Scorsese has directed critically and commercially acclaimed films such as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Shutter Island, The Departed, Gangs of New York, and The Wolf of Wall Street among others. He recently rallied against the obsession over box office numbers calling it 'repulsive' and 'really insulting'.
Scorsese was delivering the speech at the 60th New York Film Festival where he started off by appreciating the festival in the times when "cinema is devalued, demeaned, belittled from all sides, not necessarily the business side but certainly the art".
The director continued, "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, and 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", he concluded.
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Earlier this month, the Baby Driver director Edgar Wright shared similar views in his interview with The Hollywood Reporter when he stated, "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."
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 "Martin Scorsese/Reuters")
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