“The Marvels” will not be breaking the $100 million mark domestically at the box office, and that only reinforces the fact that audiences might finally be getting sick of superhero movies .
According to actress Jodie Foster, that’s a good thing, she wants superhero movies to die off (via Elle). The Oscar-winning actress can’t wait for for it to end:
It’s a phase. It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases [throughout my career]. Hopefully people will soon be sick of it. The good ones — like “Iron Man,” “Black Panther,” “The Matrix” — I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s now why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.
It’s amusing how all of these filmmakers and actors are suddenly coming out against the superhero genre, but only because it’s become fashionably cool to do so.
When Scorsese started the “Marvel is not cinema” debate in October 2019, it was music to my ears. It was a long time coming. A universally loved and legendary filmmaker like Scorsese finally came out against Marvel and superhero culture, causing a domino effect, as Francis Ford Coppola followed suit, with many more to follow soon after. It took someone of Scorsese’s ilk to shake things up.
When all is said and done, and film historians start to look back at the 2010s, many years from now, they will notice that corporate greed manifestly overpowered risk-taking at the movies. This all came at a time when movie audiences chose hibernation at home. And yet, Marvel found a way to create a record-breaking movie formula.
But the monopolization of cinema in recent years also led the media to tell us that superhero epics mattered in ways they should have never been credited for. As Bilge Ebiri so eloquently stated in his excellent think-piece on Scorsese/Marvel:
There is a belief, parroted by fans and filmmakers and corporate honchos alike, that superhero epics and space-war movies and adventure fantasies matter in ways they never quite mattered before.
And so, as our world has become increasingly more complicated and unsettling, audiences are being fed fast food at the movies. The films we consume have become even more infantilized. It took a legendary voice like Scorsese’s to wake people up from their slumbers.
Now, what’s the next infantilized trend that’ll replace Marvel as box-office king? Mattel? Nintendo?
“Hope,” Na’s first film in ten years — his last one being the exemplary “The Wailing” —is a gloriously messy, blood-soaked sci-fi epic that may become a cult classic despite—or because of—its polarizing nature.