If you wanted to, you could wait until November 27 and watch Martin Scorsese’s star-studded crime epic The Irishman on Netflix from the comfort of your own home, but that doesn’t mean you should. The director and his cast still believe that the optimal way to see the film is in theaters, on the big screen. The Irishman’s Ray Romano offered his take on why the theater experience is so important, saying:
“It’s also the shared experience. When there’s those silences and it’s compelling and it’s heavy. Just to know you don’t know any of these people, but we’re all feeling the same thing. That’s part of it.”
To Ray Romano, it’s not just the quality of the presentation, the giant screen and the immersive sound that distinguish the theatrical experience from watching a movie like The Irishman at home. It’s also that oft-cited communal experience of watching a movie in theaters with an audience. As Ray Romano tells Today, when you watch a movie in the theater, you are sharing an experience with a whole auditorium full of people that you don’t know.
There is something special about the unspoken human connection that is formed among a group of strangers, as they all react to the story they are watching unfold onscreen together. As Ray Romano says, that shared experience means that everyone in the theater can sit in utter silence and stillness, holding in their breaths during a heavy moment. The same is true when the theater laughs during a funny moment, tears up during a sad one or cheers during a happy one.
It’s cool to know everyone is feeling the same thing and we’ve all had great theatrical experiences that possessed these qualities. To Ray Romano, this is what separates the experience of watching a movie theatrically from watching a movie at home. Even if you have unlimited funds to afford a great home theater and you can invite a bunch of friends over, you can’t really replicate this.
Piggybacking off of Ray Romano’s opinion about the shared theatrical experience, fellow Irishman star Al Pacino, in a seemingly inescapable component of this film’s press tour, invoked Marvel movies. But he did so in a positive way, saying:
“With some of the other films, the bigger, more popular films, the Marvel films, do have that experience. It’s an event the same way a sporting event is an event. They go to it, you’re there.”
Source: The Irishman’s Al Pacino And Ray Romano Talk Why The Theater Experience Is So Important