Net­flix will bring The Irish­man to Broad­way (kind of)

The­atri­cal purists have decried the inter­net as all four horse­men of the apoc­a­lypse rolled into one for brick-and-mor­tar movie hous­es. But today, one self-declared­ly ​“dis­rup­tive” stream­ing ser­vice announced plans to put a movie in a the­ater. Speak­ing onto­log­i­cal­ly, does that make this build­ing a a movie the­ater? The answer may sur­prise you.

Net­flix will bring Mar­tin Scors­ese​’slate-phase mas­ter­work The Irish­man to the Belas­co The­atre in New York City for a very spe­cial big-screen run. It will be spe­cial in the respect that the Belas­co, owned by Broad­way king­pins The Shu­bert Orga­ni­za­tion, has only ever host­ed musi­cals and stage plays.

The same crit­ics of Netflix’s often con­found­ing the­atri­cal poli­cies imme­di­ate­ly cried foul at the engage­ment sched­uled from 1 Novem­ber to 1 Decem­ber, at the stan­dard eight-a-week sched­ule (mati­nees on Sat­ur­days and Sun­days, Mon­days off) of the Great White Way. Tech­ni­cal fetishists have not­ed that the acoustics of the Belas­co space favor the human voice but will fight pro­ject­ed sound, though Netflix’s release promis­es to out­fit the audi­to­ri­um with top-flight audio­vi­su­al equipment.

Scors­ese, well-known defend­er of the sanc­ti­ty of the the­atri­cal envi­ron­ment that he is, con­tributed a state­ment: ​“We’ve lost so many won­der­ful the­aters in New York City in recent years, includ­ing sin­gle house the­aters like the Ziegfeld and the Paris. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to recre­ate that sin­gu­lar expe­ri­ence at the his­toric Belas­co The­atre is incred­i­bly excit­ing.” This will be far from the most con­tro­ver­sial thing Mar­tin Scors­ese has said in the past week.

Time will tell whether this deci­sion rep­re­sents a nos­tal­gic com­mit­ment to recre­at­ing a bygone era of moviego­ing glitz, or a tone-deaf effort to slather some more mon­ey onto Netflix’s big end-of-the-year project. If noth­ing else, how­ev­er, we may now all spend the remain­der of the after­noon scratch­ing our chins and pon­der­ing what it means to be a movie the­ater. Sure­ly, Descartes account­ed for this.

The Irish­man comes to the­aters in the US on 1 Novem­ber, and then the UK on 8 November.