08/06/2025
Martin Scorsese no longer watches movies in theaters
The legendary director, once a faithful disciple of the big screen, has withdrawn from public screenings entirely. The reason is not age, not cynicism, but the collapse of silence.
In a recent conversation with veteran critic and longtime friend Peter Travers, Scorsese revealed his private sorrow: the sacred space of the cinema has been vandalized—not with graffiti, but with glowing phones, mindless chatter, and a public now more in love with distraction than with dreams.
Travers recalls the exchange: “Come on, Marty, we couldn’t keep our mouths shut when we were kids.”
Scorsese, eyes shadowed by memory, responded, “Yeah, maybe. But when we talked, it was about the movie—about the joy of dissecting it, frame by frame.”
That reverence has vanished.
Now, the theater is a battlefield of broken concentration. Soda barrels slosh like oil drums. iPhones blaze like distress flares in a storm. Audience etiquette, once an unspoken pact, has decayed into oblivion. For a man who holds cinema as sacred scripture, each interruption is not just rude—it is a form of blasphemy.
And so, like a monk retreating to his cell, Scorsese has created his own sanctuary. His New York townhouse hides multiple screening rooms, each lined with film relics and vintage posters—a personal temple where he watches in peace. Here, he praises the likes of TÁR, Nosferatu, Pearl, Hereditary, and I Saw the TV Glow, not as passing diversions but as liturgical texts.
Alfred Hitchcock might call it a new kind of suspense: not “will the killer strike,” but “will the man behind you shut off his phone?”
And Nabokov might murmur, “We no longer attend the performance—we scroll past it.”
Cinema, for Scorsese, is not content. It is not background. It is not ambient noise. It is the beating heart of a life spent asking, watching, cutting, shaping. And that heart needs quiet. It needs darkness. It needs submission.
But today, audiences cannot submit. Attention spans crack like cheap reels. Halfway through a film, fingers twitch. Eyes wander. The story—so painstakingly composed—becomes mere wallpaper to the buzz of the outside world.
So Scorsese no longer gambles with the roulette of the multiplex. He watches alone, not in bitterness, but in mourning.
He has not abandoned cinema.
He has abandoned us.