Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige is the most powerful producer in Hollywood. He’s the mastermind behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a series of 22 hugely powerful superhero films produced over the past 11 years and all wound together in the style of the comics that inspired them, resulting in success undreamed of since the Hollywood of old.
With all this success, it doesn’t really matter if some people — even some high-powered, well-respected people — point out the more pernicious aspects of the MCU, but we’ve been talking a lot about it lately anyway. I’m referring here about legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, about a million others), who made headlines about a month back when he said that Marvel movies “aren’t cinema.”
"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."
Speaking on The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, Feige responded to those comments, agreeably disagreeing in his trademark upbeat style. “I think that’s not true,” he said when asked about Scorsese’s comments. “I think it’s unfortunate. I think myself and everyone who works on these movies loves cinema, loves movies, loves going to the movies, loves to watch a communal experience in a movie theater full of people.”
"Everybody has a different definition of cinema. Everybody has a different definition of art. Everybody has a different definition of risk. Some people don’t think it’s cinema. Everybody is entitled to their opinion. Everyone is entitled to repeat that opinion. Everyone is entitled to write op-eds about that opinion, and I look forward to what will happen next. But in the meantime, we’re going to keep making movies."
Above, Feige is responding specifically to an op-ed Scorsese wrote for The New York Times earlier this month, where he refined some of his points. “What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger,” Scorsese wrote. “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.”
"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."
In response, Feige named several instances where he and his team had taken risks. You can decide for yourself whether you think they check out. “We did Civil War,” he said. “We had our two most popular characters get into a very serious theological and physical altercation. We killed half of our characters at the end of [Avengers: Infinity War]. I think it’s fun for us to take our success and use it to take risks and go in different places.”
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA – NOVEMBER 03: Kevin Feige attends the 23rd Annual Hollywood Film Awards at The Beverly Hilton Hotel on November 03, 2019 in Beverly Hills, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for HFA)
Okay, I enjoyed Civil War and Infinity War as much as anyone, but I dunno if those are the best examples to of bold risk-taking. Yeah, it was shocking to see everyone get snapped away in Infinity War, but we all knew they were coming right back in Endgame. Likewise, the heroes fought against each other in Civil War, but they weren’t working alongside each other again a couple movies later. I’ve enjoyed every Marvel movie I’ve seen, but I think Scorsese has a point that they all work within a certain formula, and that they’re designed with box office returns in mind. And I don’t really see anything wrong with that.
Still, Feige kept stumping for his risk-taking ventures, holding up WandaVision — a new show coming to Disney+, as an another example. “It is unlike anything we’ve done before. It’s unlike anything this genre has done before,” he said. “And yes, if you are turned off by the notion of a human having extra abilities, and that means everything in which that happens is lumped into the same category, then they might not be for you. But the truth is, these are all — like all great science-fiction stories — parables.”
WandaVision does sound pretty weird. I have my eye on that one.
Feige also named The Eternals — one of Marvel’s big 2020 tentpole movies — as a risk. Starring the likes of Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden and Kit Harington, The Eternals follows a group of immortal alien beings charged with protecting the Earth from their evil counterparts, the Deviants. Like the Guardians of the Galaxy before them, the Eternals aren’t widely known, but Marvel is going in on them anyway. “It is a very big movie,” Feige said. “It is a very expensive movie. And we are making it because we believe in [director Chloe Zhao’s] vision and we believe in what those characters can do and we believe we need to continue to grow and evolve and change and push our genre forward. That’s a risk if I’ve ever heard one.”
There are also new superheroes coming to Disney+, which will feature shows about Ms. Marvel — the studio’s first Muslim hero — She-Hulk and Moon Knight. All three of those heroes, Feige confirmed, will also appear on the big screen down the line.
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For fun, MCU stars are also weighing on this debate:
- Chris Evans (Captain America), speaking to Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow) for Variety, put it in terms of the chicken or the egg: “Did audiences only start going to lowbrow stuff, so that’s what we started making? Or is it that we made it first, and now that’s all we’re offered?”
- Johansson, for her part, said that she found Scorsese’s comments “old-fashioned,” “disappointing” and “sad”…at first, but clearly they got her to thinking about how big tentpole movies are crowding smaller films out of cinemas these days. “It made me think about how people consume content now, and how there’s been this huge sea change with their viewing experience,”
- Chadwick Boseman (Black Panther) talked about Scorsese to The Independent, stumping for his own MCU solo vehicle. “The mystery that Scorsese is talking about is in Black Panther. If he saw it, he didn’t get that there was this feeling of not knowing what was going to happen that black people felt. We thought, you know, ‘White people will kill us off, so it’s a possibility that we could be gone.’ We felt that angst. We felt that thing you would feel from cinema when we watched it. That’s cultural. Maybe it’s generational.”
You can hear the rest of Feige’s comments — he does things beyond defending Marvel from Martin Scorsese, I swear — at The Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, Disney+ comes out tomorrow, and you can sample a bunch of MCU movies yourself to see if they’re cinema. Here’s the lineup available on Day 1:
- Iron Man
- Iron Man 2
- Thor
- Captain America: The First Avenger
- The Avengers
- Iron Man 3
- Thor: Dark World
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- Avengers: Age of Ultron
- Ant-Man
- Captain America: Civil War
- Doctor Strange
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
- Avengers: Endgame
- Captain Marvel
The list is missing Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp, all of which will continue to stream on Netflix for a while. Then there are the new Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland, which are technically Sony productions, so I’m not sure what’s happening with them.
So what is this great debate coming to? Probably nothing. The MCU is a huge success and it isn’t going anyway, but the discusses does provide food for thought.
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