Seth Rogen: Marvel movies are “geared towards kids”

Big budget superhero movies can’t catch a break from critics these days. Hollywood big wigs like Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, and Francis Ford Coppola have ragged on them in recent years; they’re starting to sound like broken records at this point.

Now Seth Rogen, a producer on Amazon’s subversive superhero show The Boys, is weighing in, and although he has some critiques, he takes a bit more of a balanced view. After all, if the MCU wasn’t the monster it is, a show like The Boys probably couldn’t have gotten made. What would be around to subvert?

“Truthfully, without Marvel, ‘The Boys’ wouldn’t exist or be interesting. I’m aware of that,” Rogen told Total Film. “I think if it was only Marvel [in the marketplace], it would be bad. But I think it isn’t – clearly. An example I’m always quoting is, there’s a point in history where a bunch of filmmakers would have been sitting around, being like, ‘Do you think we’ll ever make a movie that’s not a Western again? Everything’s a Western! Westerns dominate the f***ing movies. If it doesn’t have a hat and a gun and a carriage, people aren’t going to go see it anymore.’”

"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."

Seth Rogan: The Boys wouldn’t exist without the Marvel Cinematic Universe

“I think that [Marvel Studios president] Kevin Feige is a brilliant guy, and I think a lot of the filmmakers he’s hired to make these movies are great filmmakers,” Rogen continues. “But as someone who doesn’t have children… It is [all] kind of geared toward kids, you know? There are times where I will forget. I’ll watch one of these things, as an adult with no kids, and be like, ‘Oh, this is just not for me.’”

Marvel movies have a wide appeal, hence why Avengers: Endgame is the second highest-grossing movie of all time. So they’re not exclusively for kids, although I like that Rogen is being measured with his thoughts rather than dismissing the movies altogether. He shows respect for the films that laid the foundation for The Boys, which mocks the genre they helped create.

Season 4 of The Boys is set to premiere sometime later this year. Meanwhile, its first live-action spinoff, Gen V, will also premiere on Prime Video in 2023.

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