The amount of new talent that has grown from the American studio system since the 2000s is pathetic, at least when compared to the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s and ‘00s.
It doesn’t help that many promising filmmakers quickly gets sucked into the Marvel and DC vacuum. The likes of Ryan Coogler, Chloe Zhao, Destin Daniel Cretton, Jon Watts, and many more, have all sold their creative souls to the corporation.
One person who will not hop on the Marvel train any time soon is Sean Baker. He mentioned to Spanish outlet Kinotico that, although he used to get offered blockbusters, once “Red Rocket” was released and seen, these offers abruptly stopped.
I think the big studio offers stopped after they saw “Red Rocket.” When they saw that movie, they said, “okay, he’s definitely not interested in doing something like that, it's that simple. With that film, I had an agent. Now I don't even have one anymore. They had contacted my team to ask me if “I might be interested in having a meeting about x or y projects. In speaking to other directors, I realized I'm not in love with Marvel movies to want to do something like this and then spend three years of my life on it. It's a competitive world and you have to be willing to fight to get movies movies. I realized that I don’t like Marvel movies enough to want to direct or do something like that.
Although he doesn’t explicitly confirm it, I do wonder if Marvel actually offered a directing gig to Baker — it would be almost as weird as that time they sought out Lucrecia Martel to direct “Black Widow.”
Baker is all about tackling the grimy underground; portraying outcasts, subcultures, sex workers — that ain’t Marvel. We reported earlier today that Baker’s next film, “Anora,” will again have a sex worker as the lead.
Over these last few years, I’ve been updating a list of all the directors that have publicly criticized superhero movies. We can now add Baker’s name to this very impressive list:
Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Fincher, Denis Villeneuve, Bong Joon-ho, Lucrecia Martel, David Cronenberg, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, David Fincher, Paul Verehoeven, Terry Gilliam, James Cameron Ridley Scott, James Gray, Jane Campion, James Mangold, Martin McDonagh, Luc Besson, William Friedkin, Ken Loach, Oliver Stone and John Woo.
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.