James Gunn criticizes Martin Scorsese for criticizing Marvel movies

In 2019, legendary film director Martin Scorsese made headlines when he claimed that Marvel movies were “not cinema”  in the way he understood it. “It’s something else. We shouldn’t be invaded by it,” he said at a screening of his Netflix film The Irishman. “We need cinemas to step up and show films that are narrative films.” He said something similar at BAFTA’s annual David Lean lecture:

"Theaters have become amusement parks. That is all fine and good but don’t invade everything else in that sense. That is fine and good for those who enjoy that type of film and, by the way, knowing what goes into them now, I admire what they do. It’s not my kind of thing, it simply is not. It’s creating another kind of audience that thinks cinema is that."

These comments continue to reverberate in film circles, maybe because they point something out that everyone kind of knows is true but don’t like to talk about. Enter James Gunn, director of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the upcoming The Suicide Squad. He had a combative take on Scorsese’s comments during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast:

"I just think it seems awful cynical that he would keep coming out against Marvel and then that is the only thing that would get him press for his movie. So he just kept coming out against Marvel so that he could get press for his movie. He’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it."

I don’t agree with this, for the record. Martin was promoting The Irishman when he made those comments, but I’m sure he has these thoughts about Marvel movies all the time; the only difference was at that he was a press tour, so he had microphones in his face and people were printing what he said.

After bashing superhero movies, James Gunn bashes Martin Scorsese for bashing superhero movies

And it seems a little weird for Gunn to say this considering he recently made headlines for saying that superhero movies are getting “really, really boring.” Was he just trying to cynically drum up interest in The Suicide Squad when he said that or is it actually how he feels? And Gunn even admitted that he agreed that, “[t]here are a lot of things that are true about what [Scorsese] said”:

"There are a lot of heartless, soulless, spectacle films out there that don’t reflect what should be happening. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve talked to film directors before they went and made a big movie, and said, ‘Hey, we’re in this together, let’s do something different with these big movies. Let’s make them something different than everything that has come before them.’ And then see them cater to every single studio whim and be grossed out, frankly."

Don’t you wish Gunn would name whatever names are on his mind here? He talks a lot about this stuff; he could write a great tell-all book.

UPDATE: Later, Gunn clarified some of his comments in a tweet, saying he only disagreed with Martin on one point: “That films based on comic books are innately not cinema.”

Eh, I call bulls**t on this response. For one thing, Martin Scorsese never said that “films based on comic books are innately not cinema.” When he made those comments he was specifically talking about Marvel movies made today. Gunn is putting words in Scorsese’s mouth. He’s straw-manning; he’s acting like someone made an argument they didn’t make and then arguing against that, rather than engaging with the more difficult points they actually did make.

For another thing, this doesn’t address Gunn’s own comments about Martin saying this stuff just to get attention for The Irishman, which was the reason Gunn was getting some blowback in the first first place. Bad tweet! Bad tweet! Alert the Twitter police!

The Suicide Squad comes out in theaters and on HBO Max this Friday. It’s getting rave reviews, so maybe Gunn succeeded in doing something different with the form?

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h/t Screen Rant