For a few years now, I feel like most of the discourse around Martin Scorsese I see is about his comments about comicbook movies. One of the many things that frustrates me about this discourse is the people that seem to misunderstand his comments. Inclusion is at the core of his comments about the state of cinema, movie theaters, and audiences. He is not suggesting that they should stop making comicbook movies. He is just advocating for more space for non-comicbook movies to exist.
I won’t link to it directly, but the most egregious example I read recently was an article from the A.V. Club titled, “Hey Kids, get off Martin Scorsese’s lawn.” Aside from being one of the most lowbrow forms of content that exists to do nothing more than generate clicks, it’s also contributing to a more toxic online discourse that seeks to divide people along arbitrary lines when I think we all want the same thing. For example, the implication is that Scorsese is going out to take shots at the MCU and superhero movies every chance he gets, when in reality, he is asked these questions and he provides his honest answers to them.
Are Superhero Movies Cinema?
I grew up on comicbook movies. The first X-Men came out when I was just five years old and Sam Rami’s Spider-Man came out when I was around seven years old. From there, I watched every single MCU movie in theaters from Iron Man all the way to Avengers: Endgame. So that should hopefully indicate that I am not some old, out-of-touch hater when I say that what Scorsese says is absolutely right about these films.
The initial quote that started this whole ordeal was during an interview with Empire, where Scorsese said that these movies are not cinema as he defines it: “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
A lot of people took this comment to be an insult, as if Scorsese is suggesting it’s not on the same level as the kind of “cinema” he is referring to. But the implication is not that one is better or worse than the other—it’s that they’re completely different things altogether.
Scorsese clarified in a piece he wrote for the New York Times that his comment wasn’t meant as an insult. He writes, “Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way.” He continues, “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.”
I think it would help to better understand the definitions in this case and Scorsese provides these in that same piece for the New York Times.
On what cinema is, he writes, “For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was 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.
It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.
And that was the key for us: it was an art form.”
On franchise pictures like the MCU, he says, “But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is 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.
They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.
Another way of putting it would be 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. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.”
“Cinema” Means More Than Just Being Available In a Movie Theater
What’s clear from this is that there is an undeniable truth to what he’s saying. The MCU will tell you that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is an espionage or mystery movie, but aside from some minor changes, the story beats are always the same. It’s a superhero movie after all, even if they coat it with a different color of paint.
Just because these movies are also played at the movie theater does not make them the same thing. Are hockey games the same thing as TV shows like Breaking Bad simply because they both play on TV? Is Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour the same thing as Barbie simply because they both played in theaters? Of course not and to suggest that is in no way trying to diminish one thing over the other.
This theme park analogy that Scorsese laid out really clicked for me after I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home. I saw that movie on opening weekend with a packed theater and it was an incredibly fun experience. We laughed, cheered, hooted, and hollered together as familiar faces returned as characters we hadn’t seen them play for years and made references to things from old movies. I enjoyed the hell out of that movie.
Then I watched it home alone on streaming, and I was bored to tears. All of the things that brought me joy and excitement on that first watch just didn’t feel the same anymore. The movie relied heavily on those moments more than most of the other superhero movies we’ve gotten, and as a rewatchable experience, it just doesn’t hold up the same.
You can even contrast that experience with a different piece of big budget cinema like the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This was an expensive undertaking that gave us three fantasy epics that made $2,993,782,523 (or about $5,007,898,527 if you adjust for inflation) at the box office. Those movies remain infinitely rewatchable and part of our cultural zeitgeist twenty years after they have released. Despite knowing all of the beats of these films by heart, I still feel the swell of emotion when I watch The Ride of the Rohirrim. These movies were crafted by people that were extremely passionate and focused on making these movies the best thing they possibly could and were afforded the opportunity to bring their vision to life. The series didn’t exist to set up something else. The movies didn’t end with a post-credits scene to generate buzz and excitement for a future product, or rely on cameos or appearances of other characters to carry them. The filmmakers were singularly focused on making each individual movie the best version of itself that it could be and were confident enough that the movie itself would be strong enough for you to see the next one. In fact, that’s precisely what happened as each movie put up larger box office numbers than the previous one.
As a fan of wrestling, I see a lot of parallels between it and these big superhero franchise movies. Seeing familiar faces appear somewhere new or the pursuit of “cheap pops” from the crowd to get them to cheer or boo for something in unison. If you’ve ever been to an opening weekend showing of a Marvel movie, you’ve probably seen people with toys, dressed up in costumes, and you behave in those theaters differently than you would if you were watching most other kinds of movies.
So Why Does Scorsese Care About This Anyway?
I’ve spoken to people that have said “Why can’t he just leave them alone and let them exist? Why does he care?”
This is a great question that I think most people would actually agree with. Here is the reason from Scorsese himself: “The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.”
This is what I meant earlier about Scorsese’s ultimate point being about inclusion. In 2023, we’re starting to see the audience interest in these franchises decline. The latest MCU offerings have been generating less money at the box office, lower Cinemascores from the paying public, and less critical success. Outside of Marvel, Warner Brothers is struggling to get any success with DC movies, and once-bankable franchises like Indiana Jones are losing heaps of money with high budgets and low box office returns.
Clearly after nearly fifteen years of similar movies being made, audiences are starting to turn their backs on what Hollywood could rely on as safe bets in the past. This is why having more options in the theater is so key. Most filmmakers fell in love with cinema by going to the theaters and watching movies and they still craft movies to be played on the big screen, but as Scorsese points out, the opportunity for people to get the financing and ability to show their movies in theaters is shrinking. Even Scorsese himself had to get financing for The Irishman from Netflix, who only gave it a short theatrical release at a limited number of theaters, so it would be awards eligible.
Scorsese is rightly worried about a generation of people who grew up with only these kinds of movies being showed at theaters. Anecdotally, I have friends who can’t remember the last time they went to a movie theater to watch anything but an MCU movie. What happens to movie theaters as those people grow tired of this and see no value in the theatrical experience all while an increasing number of companies have created their own at-home streaming offerings?
These are all things that Scorsese (and I) fear. He has never suggested that we should scrap comicbook movies from theaters, he just wants more room for other movies to have a chance as well. If Scorsese was to get his wish, we would all benefit from more opportunities to showcase diverse stories told by an increasingly diverse group of people.
I Believe The Tide is Turning
There is good news on this front. If we look at some of the big successes in the last few years, there is reason to be optimistic. Last year, we got Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, which both soared (and swam) to overwhelming financial and critical success. While both sequels, both movies were created by passionate people dedicated to the craft of cinema. Tom Cruise famously refused to release Top Gun: Maverick to streaming during the pandemic, because this movie was made to be seen on the big screen. With Avatar, James Cameron has been working on this film actively since 2017, developing new and innovative ways to capture performance and showcase it in beautifully imagined digital worlds.
More recently, we’re coming off of the summer of Barbenheimer. Barbie was written and directed by Greta Gerwig who had only made smaller but critically well-received indie movies prior to this. At the time of writing, Barbie has grossed over $1.438 billion. Oppenheimer was released on the same day as Barbie and is a three-hour-long biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer. It was written and directed by Christopher Nolan and has made over $942 million at the box office on a $100 million budget.
What these four successes should indicate is that there is an appetite for great movies created by passionate people who were given the means to make the movies they wanted and were able to show those movies the way they were meant to be seen: on the big screen.
Has Hollywood learned the right lessons from that success? Well it doesn’t seem like it just yet. Instead, Warner Brothers has greenlit a bunch of projects based on Mattel products because it was the potential of the Mattel cinematic universe that excited audiences, not the touching story and great performances of Barbie that excited audiences, right?
Martin Scorsese Is Not Your Enemy
To conclude this piece, don’t be angry at Scorsese for his comments on superhero movies. His comments were not meant to offend you or diminish something you enjoy. He just wants to see more opportunity for the type of movies he grew up loving and spent his life creating and nurturing.
The cinema he wants to see more of challenges you, causes you to feel, question yourself, and to move you in deep and meaningful ways. He doesn’t want that at the expense of the thing you love, but to be a viable part of a system that can exist alongside of those things you love.
The world needs more art like that in the face of the gruel of “content” that is so common today.
Scorsese closed his NYT piece with this, “The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.
For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.”
I will close mine with this: Instead of fighting uselessly on the internet, let’s support movies in all their forms. Head to your local theater and see something you haven’t heard much about but that piques your interest. That one movie might be the very picture that inspires you in ways you didn’t think possible.
Don’t take cinema for granted, because there is no guarantee that this thing we love will be here forever. Oh, and if you haven’t already, get your tickets for Martin Scorsese’s Killer of the Flower Moon today!
Adriana Wiszniewska