About

This Is Cinema refers to a series of reaction images featuring the American director Martin Scorsese (or the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho) alongside the quote "This is cinema" or "To me, this is cinema." Online, the images are often posted as a reply to posts mentioning movies, TV shows, cartoons, anime or any other form of media as an ironic response or genuine compliment about the piece of media.

Origin

On October 4th, 2019, the American director Martin Scorsese^[1] compared Marvel films to "theme parks" during an interview, saying the movies were "not cinema." The news gained interest on social media, with people mocking the director's interview using the reverse quote "This is cinema" and a picture of Scorsese, taken by the Associate Press photographer Victoria Will in 2016, as an ironic response to the controversial line. On August 20th, 2021, Twitter^[2] user @timelord1124 shared a fake quote from the director to complement a special Halloween-themed event at Universal Orlando park (tweet seen below).

Although is not clear who created the first version of the meme, around October 2021, a black and white image of Martin Scorsese with the quote "This is cinema" started to be used as an image macro meme on Twitter.

Spread

From 2021 to 2023, the reaction image saw a gradual spread online. On October 20, 2021, Twitter^[3] user @KensRea shared the image in response to a reenactment of the Interstellar docking scene made by a drone with a lightbulb (seen below), but received only eight likes in two years.

pic.twitter.com/vwN4sqc2xY

— m3gKen (@KensRea) October 20, 2021

The meme was most frequently used to indicate the person's like or dislike of a specific piece of media, like in the post by Twitter^[4] user @BingeWatchThis_ on January 25th, 2022, which uses the meme paired with a Spider-Man: No Way Home poster, garnering 15,900 likes and 1,300 retweets in a year (seen below).

To Me, That's Cinema

Scorsese is not the only director whose image is featured in the meme trend. A clip from a May 2021 interview with the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho began to be used as an image macro, using the director's quote "to me, that's cinema" on social media. Twitter user @coachdynoDFO^[5] responded to a clip of a sloppy doggy with Joon-ho's image, receiving 1,734 likes and 21 retweets since it was uploaded on March 10th, 2022.

pic.twitter.com/C6U1AOO2QD

— Coach Dyno (@coachdynoDFO) March 10, 2022

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References