Martin Scorsese never tires of emphasizing his distaste for Marvel and other superhero films and raising the flag for “real movies.” The 81-year-old more than deserves this fierce anti-attitude, but even in his younger years the director of “Killers Of The Flower Moon” did not have an easy time holding his own against the competition, which sometimes seemed overwhelming. Because of course, as a directing legend he is mentioned in the same breath as Steven Spielberg or George Lucas – but commercially speaking he lagged behind in the 70s and 80s.
In an interview with the in 1990, Scorsese explained why Spielberg and Lucas in particular chose him Sylvester Stallone sometimes quite intimidated. “I wanted to make a certain type of film,” said the filmmaker. “It was the beginning of the Reagan era. Sylvester Stallone does [mit ,Rocky’] created its own mythology, and people adapted to it.”
Scorsese felt that his works ignored the spirit of the times, but on the other hand he couldn’t (and didn’t want to) make other films. “I wanted to go my own way,” the “GoodFellas” creator continued. “But that would mean automatic […]that my films could never satisfy the audience the way traditional hero films, like all Rocky’s, do? And as ,Like a wild bull‘ comes out, who will watch it? Who cares about this man? No one – that’s what I thought too.”
With his black-and-white biopic about world boxing champion Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), Scorsese created a kind of alternative to the ‘Rocky’ films in 1980. While they celebrate the American dream, in ‘Like a Raging Bull’ the downfall only came after the success. “The whole mood in the country was different,” Scorsese continued. “With films likeRocky‘ and ultimately the Spielberg-Lucas films made a lot of money. They were the myth makers then, and to some extent they still are. I mean, ‘New York, New York’ was a total flop and opened the same week as ‘Star Wars’.”
The romantic musical ‘New York, New York’, which is nevertheless laced with dark tones, followed Scorsese’s remarkable success with ‘Taxi Driver’, which won him the Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival. But the musical film failed at the box office: with a production budget of 14 million dollars, it managed to gross only 16.4 million – a huge loss. “That’s when I knew which way the wind was blowing, and it certainly wasn’t blowing my way,” Scorsese said. “That’s why I just did my best with ‘Raging Bull’, because I had nothing and everything to lose.”
The boxer drama was also – as Scorsese feared – not a big hit: the big blockbuster of 1980 was called ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. But Scorsese got something else, namely excellent reviews – and eight Oscar nominationswhere he was even allowed to take home two statues, for editor and leading actor De Niro.
Fortunately, the next flop did no lasting damage to the master director’s career – but that’s another story, which you can read here: