I’ve been trying to ignore the comments on this post for days, but we’re going on 10k notes, now, and I’ve had a bit too much MCU Stans Being Willfully Ignorant And Purposely Misinterpreting Quotes this morning, so let’s take a crack at this.
First of all, it’s not an attack on genre films, generally. It’s not even an attack on a genre of film, specifically. He didn’t speak about “superhero movies” as a whole, like Ridley Scott or James Cameron have in the recent past (although, let’s face it, the genre is synonymous with Marvel at the moment, anyway). He expressly targeted Marvel films; the MCU in particular. Gee, I wonder why.
He also didn’t say that they were “bad”, he called them theme parks. You read that superficially and assumed that he meant, “Things that are fun” but what he actually meant was, “Things that are built with the soul purpose of funneling people into seats to be optimally profitable.”
It’s very amusing to me that you folks will log on Tumblr to hem and haw about late stage capitalism, but then leap at the chance to defend your favorite Mickey Mouse production from the scary old man who’s been trying his best to make good films for 50yrs. What good, respectable consumers!
Lastly, he refers to cinema as “human beings trying to convey emotional, and psychological experiences to other human beings,” and you guys all either went, 1) “Cinema just means it’s a movie played in a theater, hurr hurr hurr,” 2) “Thor almost cried one time when he planet blow up,” or 3) “That’s pretentious! Everything is art! My cheerios are art!” and again this is missing the point.
When you watch a Marvel film, a writer didn’t decide that he had something interesting to say about Frog Man and pen a script, and then a director didn’t get to take said script and produce a work through their own artistic lens. A boardroom full of people in suits sat around and decided which licensed properties they already owned the rights to would be most profitable, and how it would fit into the conveyor belt of content they’d already pre-designed, and then they controlled every single aspect of that production, down to tone and color grading. And if you don’t believe that, ask Edgar Wright.
Martin Scorsese gave you guys an incredibly milquetoast, obvious criticism of movies you slurp down, and it made you all fume, but what you should be mad about is that you’re forced to consume fast food art when you could, just as easily, be getting filet mignon with the same genre and character roster.
Everyone likes to bring up Black Panther, but can you imagine a world where the incredibly talented Ryan Coogler hadn’t been handcuffed by a corporation. Can you imagine the movie that could have been?
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