Filmmaker Martin Scorsese hit the headlines for expressing trepidation around what “the glut of franchise and comic book entertainment” is doing to cinema.
“The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture,” Scorsese said in an interview with GQ, ahead of the Oct. 20 release of his latest movie “The Killers of the Flower Moon.” “Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those — that’s what movies are.”
To make the filmmaking industry stronger, Scorsese thinks it needs to come from “the grassroots level.”
“It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. 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,” Scorsese told GQ. “Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. Let’s see what you got. Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
It’s not the first time the star director has weighed in on superhero movies. He has previously compared superhero movies to theme parks.
“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? 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,” he said in 2019, per Variety.
After his commentary elicited response from Marvel filmmakers like James Gunn, Scorsese wrote an opinion article in The New York Times explaining his thoughts.
“So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple,” Scorsese wrote for the Times. “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.”
Scorsese said that a lot of films today are “manufactured for immediate consumption” and the industry lacks the “productive tension” between the business side and the creative side of Hollywood. “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 increasing rare,” Scorsese wrote for the Times.
What’s next for Martin Scorsese?
Scorsese’s latest film, “The Killers of the Flower Moon,” will premiere in theaters on Oct. 20.
The filmmaker announced earlier this year that he would be making a film about Jesus. “I have responded to the Pope’s appeal to artists in the only way I know how: by imagining and writing a screenplay for a film about Jesus. And I’m about to start making it.”