If you took my advice or the advice of pretty much everyone that has seen the blockbuster new release from Netflix, The Irishman, although long, is a tremendous piece of cinema.
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While the film undoubtedly has a very similar theme to other Scorsese classics (especially Goodfellas,) it does an excellent job of portraying the interior of the mob underworld, this time complete with "subtitles" explaining what happened to real life gangsters (spoiler: Most were murdered.) For me at least, this helped to complete the overall picture of how truly unique the Jimmy Hoffa situation was.
I felt it was one of the most compelling pieces of film I have seen in quite some time. I say this as someone who hates knowing the ending of films right from the start and well, even if you don't know much about Jimmy Hoffa, you already know what happened to him.
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Despite "bringing the gangster band" back together including the elusive Joe Pesci, Scorsese said "no studio wanted to do it and if it weren't for Netflix, it likely wouldn't have been made."
This comes at the helm of Martin Scorsese being extremely critical of big money-making franchises such as the Marvel Universe and he is on record as having said that cinemas are being "invaded by theme parks."
Now I actually enjoy the Marvel films (for the most part) and i think it is safe to say, since all of these films make hundreds of millions of dollars, that it is understandable why the big studios would continue to make them. However, Scorsese is not wrong - the featured films these days are almost exclusively something about superheroes and the ending (except for one, which wasn't really an ending anyway) are always the same.
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Long-time friend of Scorsese and frequent addition to his cast Harvey Keitel chimed in in a separate interview saying "Hollywood is aiming only for commercialization."
Now here's the thing: I'm not going to "booo" these guys even though I think what they are saying is obvious. Hollywood films, for the most part, have become quite a mix of the usual things that they know is going to make money even if it sucks. These films are even more likely to be made if merchandising is going to become an additional part of it (find me a child that doesn't have at least one piece of Avengers gear.)
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Mark Hamill said in an interview when he appeared to be drunk: "It doesn't matter if its good, so long as it makes money...and oh my God I just realized all of this is on film!"
On the other hand though, i think that we have a tendency to forget that the big studios in Hollywood and anywhere else in the world are first and foremost, businesses.
If you owned a company that sold two products, one that was a labor of love and you were really proud of but routinely lost money, and another one you were friggin sick of but always turned a large profit.... which one would you manufacture?
I agree with you Martin and I am happy that streaming services like Netflix exist because of this. However, money drives literally everything in the world and unfortunately this is very unlikely to change.