Martin Scorsese hates that movies are now called 'content' — and throws some of the blame on Rotten Tomatoes

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May 1, 2018 5:45 PM

While accepting the inaugural Robert Osborne award at the TCM Classic Film Festival, Martin Scorsese had some choice words for Rotten Tomatoes and the watering down of movies to just being another form of content.

Martin Scorsese spoke about "the devaluation of cinema itself" while accepting an award at the TCM Classic Film Festival.
He also called out Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore for causing movies to be "reduced to content."

Martin Scorsese hates the word "content."

While accepting the inaugural Robert Osborne Award at the TCM Classic Film Festival over the weekend, Scorsese took the moment to lay into the things he said are leading to, as he called it, "the devaluation of cinema itself."

The legendary Oscar-winning director said that though it's an amazing time to have easy access to movies that were so hard to get decades ago, the result has led to something very troubling.

“It can all be summed up in the word that’s being used now: content,” Scorsese said while accepting his award, according to Entertainment Weekly. “All movie images are lumped together. You’ve got a picture, you’ve got a TV episode, a new trailer, you’ve got a how-to video on a coffee-maker, you’ve got a Super Bowl commercial, you’ve got 'Lawrence of Arabia,' it’s all the same.”

Scorsese said that because there's "no sense of value" tied to a movie, it's all now being sampled in bits and pieces.

He also went on to call out popular review aggregators Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore for their contribution to devaluating movies.

"The horrible idea they reinforce [is] that every picture, every image is there to be instantly judged and dismissed without giving audiences time to see it. Time to see it, maybe ruminate and maybe make a decision for themselves," he said. "So the great 20th-century art form, the American art form, is reduced to content.”

Though this is not the first time Scorsese has addressed his dislike for how movies are no longer cherished as they once were, it comes at an interesting time in his career. He's currently working on his next movie, "The Irishman," for Netflix, which arguably is one of the greatest disrupters of the traditional moviegoing experience he's so fond of.

It will be interesting to get his take on things once he does press for that movie.

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