Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’
Martin Scorsese urges filmmakers to fight comic book movie culture: ‘We’ve got to save cinema’
Martin Scorsese wants filmmakers to 'save cinema' by fighting comic book movie culture, which he called manufactured content.
Martin Scorsese is urging filmmakers to save cinema, by doubling down on his call to fight comic book movie culture.
The storied filmmaker is revisiting the topic of comic book movies in a new profile for GQ. Despite facing intense blowback from filmmakers, actors and the public for the 2019 comments he made slamming the Marvel Cinematic Universe films — he called them theme parks rather than actual cinema — Scorsese isn’t shying away from the topic.
“The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture,” he told GQ. “Because there are going to be generations now that think ... that’s what movies are.”
GQ’s Zach Baron posited that what Scorsese was saying might already be true, and the “Killers of the Flower Moon” filmmaker agreed.
“They already think that. Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves,” Scorsese continued to the outlet. “And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. ... Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
Scorsese referred to movies inspired by comic books as “manufactured content” rather than cinema.
“It’s almost like AI making a film,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you?”
His forthcoming film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” had been on Scorsese’s wish list for several years; it’s based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction book of the same name. He called the story “a sober look at who we are as a culture.”
The film tells the true story of the murders of Osage Nation members by white settlers in the 1920s. DiCaprio originally was attached to play FBI investigator Tom White, who was sent to the Osage Nation within Oklahoma to probe the killings. The script, however, underwent a significant rewrite.
“After a certain point,” the filmmaker told Time, “I realized I was making a movie about all the white guys.”
The dramatic focus shifted from White’s investigation to the Osage and the circumstances that led to them being systematically killed with no consequences.
The character of White now is played by Jesse Plemons in a supporting role. DiCaprio stars as the husband of a Native American woman, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), an oil-rich Osage woman, and member of a conspiracy to kill her loved ones in an effort to steal her family fortune.
Scorsese worked closely with Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear and his office from the beginning of production, consulting producer Chad Renfro told Time. On the first day of shooting, the Oscar-winning filmmaker had an elder of the nation come to set to say a prayer for the cast and crew.
I mean, he's not wrong. But there has always been a ton of shitty action movies with the same cut and paste plot. Marvel just tweaked the formula.
And it's not like good movies aren't still being made. The Marvel movies are historically bad at winning awards. There have been a handful of nominations, but not a lot of wins. The wins always go to good movies that deserve them.
Sure, the Marvel movies pull in more money than other movies, but the money makers are usually trash. Marvel is like the McDonald's of movies. It's going to pull in way more money than a fine dining establishment, but not because it's good, because it's the garbage that the public will take out their wallet for. There is space in the market for both of these things.
People who disparage Marty forget or don't know that he has been a fierce proponent and heavy financial supporter of film restoration through companies like Milestone Films for more than three decades now. If you ever enjoyed world cinema, the films of Kalatozov, Pasolini, Buñuel, Murnau and many more, there is a decent chance you were able to enjoy them in good quality through the direct efforts of Martin Scorsese and others.
“Because there are going to be generations now that think … that’s what movies are.”
should be understood in this context as well. We owe him so much gratitude for keeping the language of film alive.
It's been that way for a loooong time.
Movies became so expensive to produce that studios can't finance them themselves.
So they turned to the banks.
Banks are by nature risk averse.
So a production company has to submit an application to their bank's movie financing department like you would when applying for a home loan.
The bank decides whether to finance the movie based on the information submitted: Script, subject matter, director, which stars have committed to the project, etc.
Now if you imagine, people from the banking industry are not artists and creatives and visionaries. They just look at raw investment potential, i.e. Is this proposed production going to pay off the loan with interest?
If there's any risk, e.g. this has never been done before, or there's no recognizable franchise branding, or if something could be controversial in a meaningful way, the bank won't approve the production loan.
So sequels, brand name franchises, with writing committees, are easier to get approvals from the banks, therefore are more likely to make it into production.
That's why Hollywood doesn't make daring, experimental, and controversial movies much anymore.
I don't think that's true. While the newest MCU movie were not doing as well as they were before, outside these main cinematic universe there have been some great recent comic book movies: the two Spiderverse movies are such absolute delights and some of the best animated movies ever made, and "The Batman" and "Joker" are fantastic as well. (Let's... not talk about the DCEU.)
I wonder if he would consider "The Departed" to be "manufactured content" by his own definition as well, considering the fact it is much more than merely "inspired" by "Infernal Affairs". Just sayin'.
My take on it is eventually viewers will tire of the genre, and it will fade out into the background like most other genres. Dramas were all the rage in the 40s, Westerns were very popular in the 50s, in the 70s and 80s you have disaster films and pure action type stuff that was incredibly popular, the 90s had the start of some very popular independent films, and the late 90s and early aughts had a lot of popular fantasy/epics and animation films.
None of those genres completely went away, and some have had resurgence from time to time. Comic based movies won't be dominating forever. There was and still are a lot of complaints about the movies made in the previous couple decades, and I think it says something that people are finding these comic stories so compelling. I think "Hollywood" needs to look in a mirror to remind themselves why these types of movies have became so popular... is it just everyone attached to beautiful art and special effects? Or is it perhaps that maybe their storytelling wasn't as great, or original as they thought, and they are losing out to stories written decades ago because they are just simply more interesting?
He's right. Not that comic book movies are bad but how they are made is bad (also other movies nowadays). Batman trilogy is magnificent and I don't like comic books.. It's all about constant action and no plot and thrilling parts to graduate the plot. You don't need bambilion of explosions to have a good movie (Joker).
Couldn't agree more. I enjoyed some of the superhero movies from the early 2000s because they had good stories, they were clearly made by people passionate about them and they felt novel at the time. Things went downhill over the next decade or so and then I saw The Avengers and thought it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen and couldn't understand why anyone would like it. Further, the people who did like it, all told me the same thing, that you need to watch half a dozen other movies first. Why? Who in their right mind makes that decision as a producer? The Avengers is a movie with no character arcs, no plot build up, no introduction, and nothing the characters do feels like it has any weight and you know they're more or less invincible. It's boring garbage and people love it to death. I haven't really watched many superhero movies since, especially Marvel.
Remember before Marvel movies, when we had such hits as Encino Man, Problem Child, Speed 2: Cruise Control, and and Cocktail? I've got news for you, Marty, cinema has been killing cinema since the dawn of cinema, and yet cinema survives. There will always be movies that someone doesn't like that make a FUCK ton of money. Then there will be the passion projects that gain a cult following decades after the fact. If you are lucky, you get a little of both sides of the coin, but most aren't. Get off your high-art horse and enjoy some escapism, not everyone has a 9 figure net worth, some of us need to forget how much life sucks and watch a guy with a hammer beat alien skulls into paste.
heres the thing, comic book movies as a concept arent bad but theyre executed terribly. disney and dc both fucking suck horrendously, thwyre unbearable
What a coincidence that he's got a movie that's "fighting back" *checks watch* oh right about now! 🙄
Not only is this ridiculous (and untrue) fearmongering about the death of "real cinema" from an old man scared for his own relevance, it's such blatant self-promotion it's sickening. Dude would be better served being silent and maintaining his (admittedly deserved) reputation and prestige in the art form instead of tarnishing it with foolish declarations like this.
Once X-Men hit at the box office, all the movie studios snatched up every single comic property they could get their greedy little hands on.
The answer is obviously more de-aged De Niro. We must determine how young he can play so I say we remake Three Men and a Baby with De Niro playing the baby. Quick, somebody call Steve Guttenberg!
He has a point and i would personally always prefer one of his movies over anything Marvel/DC but just let people enjoy what they want, Jesus.
And what actually saved the cinemas sure wasn't Hugo or his Netflix film Irishman but all those multi billion comic book blockbusters. Not sure how many cinemas would still exist without them.
Luckily, Disney is way ahead of him on ruining comic book movies.
No lies detected.
Honestly tuned out of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe stuff after the Avengers Age Of Ultron movie. It all felt so manufactured and artificial by then already.
People removed about it, and its because Martin is 100% right. Comic book things are collapsing now at Disney.
He's forgetting movie history...
Back when television got big, cinema had to evolve to survive. The aspect ratio went wide.
This Is Cinerama was more of a tech demo than anything else in 1952, but it was followed by widescreen movie, movies in 1953 with "The Robe" being shot and shown in Cinemascope.
Technicolor too gave a more vibrant color scheme even than previous color film processing that actually came a generation prior, in 1932.
But the widescreen/Technicolor combination provided a must see experience that were the event films of the era and they couldn't be duplicated at home.
Roll forward 50 years... home theater technology has evolved to a point where theater has to compete with 65" 4K television displays and 7.1 Dolby Atmos surround sound. People need a reason to leave their homes and deal with noisy, disease infected, crowds, high concession prices, expensive tickets, and annoyances like having to pre-pick your own seats instead of just walking in and sitting down.
Streaming is keeping people at home, being able to binge long form content, pausing when necessary. Cinema can't provide that experirnce.
So it's going the other way, the "theme park ride experience". It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the first Pirates of the Carribean movie hit in 2003, pre-dating the wave of comic book movies by, what? 5 or 6 years? 50 years after the first Cinerama movies?
But even that has roots going back to Jurassic Park (1993), Star Wars (1977), and Jaws (1975).
Now, don't get me wrong, I dearly love "small" films like Scorsese's After Hours, or even modern stuff like Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, but there is ZERO compelling reason to see them in a theater. I can get the same experience viewing them on my home theater setup without, you know, blowing $50 to sit in a noisy, uncomfortable theater.
To do THAT, I NEED a spectacle. I need to see something that demands I see it right away, in a theatrical environment. It needs to be a theme park ride.
If your end goal is to make a tight knit drama full of people in rooms talking to each other, well, Downton Abbey and Bridgerton are over there ->
It's weird to me that he's lumping all comic book movies together and acting like they're the problem. We keep having trash movies churned out by studios because they make money. That's been true since at least the nineteen-forties if not earlier. Hell, I'm really just talking about the ones where enough of them still survive that you can go find them. Earlier, in the silent era, yeah, you had trash get made quickly and churned out so that people would pay a dime to watch it. I don't get how a single genre is supposed to be the culmination that's ruining cinema.
But, here's the thing. Have movies changed over the years? Absolutely. Scorcesie's movies have changed over the years! His style has changed, his vision has changed. What sells tickets has changed. How studios are producing films based on what they think will make them money has changed. It's been discussed before that the fall of video rentals and the rise of streaming has changed what kinds of movies studios are willing to put their money behind and how they're less likely to take a risk on something than they used to be. That's a problem. That's a big problem because it's reduced the number of small-budget and medium-budget studio films. None of that can be blamed on comic book adaptations.
And there's nothing inherently wrong with a comic book adaptation. Marvel movies are overly formulaic and especially since Disney bought them overly safe. Even in the ones I like, I can just feel that Disney touch that makes me go, "Ew," sometimes. DC's movies have been mismanaged with an unfit vision helming its original run from the start. So the big series, yes, I'll admit, they're kind of shit cinema. I still enjoy some of them, but they're kind of shit cinema. There are plenty of shit crime movies and thrillers and other things like that, but I'm not going to start yelling about how they're killing cinema and we have to fight against them. Why do comic book adaptations get singled out as artless trash when there's a constant stream of hollow feel-good romance films that get churned out every year? Do those formulaic vacuous sap-fests (some of which I love and will watch whenever I need a good cry, I'm really not knocking them) really merit a pass yet for some reason comic books require this war be waged by filmmakers against them? I really don't see how they're the problem.
And you can come in and say things like, "He's just stirring the pot to promote his film," but I don't think so. Scorsese has had a lot to say about modern filmmaking even when he doesn't have a project on the table. He's talked about his feelings on modern film culture, comic book adaptations, using the word content to describe any form of media, and more. I really don't think he's doing it to bring attention to any project so much as he just really feels very strongly that movies have changed and change is bad? Is that really what it is? Because some of the stuff he sees as a problem, yeah, I agree, it's an issue. But other stuff like this, even if there is a problem, your aim at what the problem really is is just completely off.
I agree. pass the popcorn the comments already begun
About a decade too late there bub
Popular cinema has been a smear on the pavement for years. Indie cinema has been going just as it's ever been.
That movie sounds dope.
As for the other part, I love comic book movies, but still agree. I think he might get more agreement if he reframed it as a complaint about homginization. For instance, I think The Batman was surprisingly fresh. Whereas the Flash was like... high end tv, maybe? Like, not BAD, but you've gotta ask: how many people will watch it five years from now? What ideas or artistic images is it introducing?
I think some comic movies --Black Panther, for instance -- move culture and inspire new stories. But a lot don't. I've heard it said that the modern studio system could never make Back to the Future or Ghostbusters, and I think that's true. A lot needs to change about how these are financed and distributed to make that not the case.
ITT: people are mad because someone doesn't like their mahvie movies
yeah I could really go without another 20 years of kind of movies
Permanently Deleted
"Stop making things I personally don't like! It's destroying the culture of America!"
The future is comic book movies, old man. Deal with it.
Only uncultured peasants watch movies. 😜
save Big Band dance hall culture while you're at it, too Marty.. that shit was fly, and there was more dames than there are at one of your little picture shows, you know what i mean, pal.. great for cardiac health too.. i mean don't get me wrong.. i like watching Joe stab an asshole in the throat with a pen just as much as the next asshole.. especially if you hit him over the head with a bat later, man that was a fucking twist outta nowhere.. fucking cinema, wow..
okay Marty good luck with everything.. seriously though, Big Band too as long as you're saving important cultural you know, institutions..
I was admittedly on the train with Marvel until End Game and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've since fallen off the MCU. I'll still catch Batman, but otherwise I'm on board with moving on.
Based
Old man doing old man things moving on 🙄
Like Spielberg, his best years after behind him and he only makes grandpa movies now
Old man yells at cloud.