Martin Scorsese spoke at a panel after the LFF screening of his masterful “The Irishman.” Of course, as you can imagine, someone had to ask Scorsese to clarify what he said about Marvel movies last week, and instead of doing damage-control, Scorsese actually doubled-down on his previous comments, calling Marvel flicks an “invasion.”
“The value of a film that is like a theme park film, for example, the Marvel pictures, where the theaters become amusement parks,” he explained. “That’s a different experience. It’s not cinema. It’s something else. Whether you go for it or not, it is something else. We shouldn’t be invaded by those movies.”
He continued, “And so, that’s a big issue. And we need the theater owners to step up for that. To allow theaters to show films that are narrative films. A narrative film can be one long take for three hours, you know? It doesn’t have to be a conventional beginning, middle, and end.”
Clearly, this is going to be news and the usual Marvel Studios actors/directors will again call him out on it, but this isn’t about Scorsese just being an old man, as many fanboys on social media have pointed out. No, this is Scorsese’s cry for help, a last-minute plea to avert the disaster only waiting to happen in the years to come if Marvel continues to monopolize its product in theaters. Scorsese is not “out of touch” with modern films and the current state of the industry, he just wants original visions to come back to the screen — will this wakeup call work? Who knows. But I, for one, am greatly supportive of this latest condemnation.