The Difference Between ‘Cinema' and ‘Roller-Coasters'

You are a young filmmaker whose first indie film showed real promise, but you know the industry you’re in is in continuous shape-shifting mode. You don’t want to sacrifice your own art, but at the same time, you know opportunities for artistic freedom are scarce.

Disney took full advantage of this problem, which many young, up-and-coming directors had this last decade, by hiring promising directors such as Taika Waititi, Rian Johnson, Garret Edwards, Chloe Zhao, Joss Whedon, James Gunn, and Ryan Coogler. If anyone tells you what these directors have done isn’t selling out, then they are in denial. The movies the above filmmakers made for the mouse house were corporate-driven and for mass marketing consumption. One cannot deny such a thing, even its most loyal of fans.

That’s why studios like A24, Annapurna and, yes, Netflix need to exist — they need to help promising young filmmakers go their own way, follow their own musings, so to speak, and not have their cinematic visions be puppeteered by the higher-ups at Disney. As numerous people associated and not associated with the MCU give their own definitions of what cinema means to them, mine has always been rather simple: cinema is and should always be considered art because — much like an author writing a book or a painter drawing with his brush, the personal authorship comes via the director in cinema. A director is meant to paint his own vision on-screen. That’s the difference between cinema and, say, a mass-assembled product. Marvel movies are the latter. Marvel isn’t about the director having the freedom to “paint” the movie with his own vision, it’s about the bottom line.

All of the above-mentioned directors made concessions by signing with Disney. Seventeen different directors were used for the 23 MCU movies, and yet, it is very hard to find distinguishable directorial traits from movie to movie. Almost every movie deriving from the MCU looks like it was made by the same person and, in a way, it was.. MCU head honcho Kevin Feige is the true mastermind behind it all, but he’s not a director, he’s more of a planner for the creative direction he wants his filmmakers to go in, while his higher-ups over at Disney dictate what he does and so forth and so forth ..

It’s this elimination of the personal vision needed which strips the “cinema” away from the MCU.