The New York Times has published an op-ed essay penned by Martin Scorsese himself, titled “I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” In the piece, Scorsese tries to further explain his controversial comments from last month when he said Marvel was not cinema.
The 76-year-old filmmaker does admit that there is genuine technical artistry behind MCU movies (one look at “Avengers: Endgame” and it’s hard to deny that), but that the essence of cinema, the mystery, discovery, and risk involved in making art, is missing from these movies.
“Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri,” he wrote in the NYT op-ed.
He went on to describe cinemas as “revelation, aesthetic, emotional and spiritual,” and about “characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”
He sees none of that in Marvel movies, adding that Marvel pictures lack ”revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”
The pre-packaged and assembled nature of Franchise films, specifically Marvel, irk the legendary director to no ends, describing them as “market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption,” he wrote. Adding that “they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not.”
Ultimately, Scorsese refuses to blame audiences for the dumbing-down of mainstream movies, saying that “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course, they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.”