Between Taxi Driver, The Silence of the Lambs, Contact and much more, Jodie Foster has firmly established herself as a movie star. And speaking to Elle last week, she also joined the old guard of Hollywood elites like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola who are fed up with every other movie being about superheroes.
Rhetorically speaking, Foster’s tone is somewhere in between Scorsese’s calm reflections and Coppola’s angry excoriations. “It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases,” Foster said. “Hopefully, people will be sick of it soon. The good ones — like Iron Man, Black Panther, The Matrix — I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it. But that’s not why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully, there’ll be room for everything else.”
Since Scorsese made his infamous comments about Marvel movies not being “cinema,” the general feeling about superhero movies in general has changed. They’re not as popular as they were, and even the studios are thinking about changing their approach. So I don’t think Foster’s comments will invite the furor that Scorsese’s did. If anything, it’s looking more likely that her wish will pan out and that superheroes will fall out of favor in Hollywood.
Thunderbolts is “not a straightforward Marvel movie as you’ve seen in the past”
But we’re still a ways out from that. In the more immediate future, we can look forward to new Marvel movies like Thunderbolts, about a team of antiheroes that includes U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), and more. The cast is great, but will people still be interested enough in the MCU to show up to see the movie when it finally comes out?
“I have confidence it’s gonna be good,” Wyatt Russell told a crown in New York the other day, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I know everybody is sort of on this Marvel train right now of things not going so well…I know so well and I know how smart Jake is and how much he cares about making something interesting and different and utilizing everyone’s talents to the best of their ability.”
"And the story that I think they’ve come up with is really interesting — I know parts of the story and how the story works, I can’t talk about it. But it’s not a straightforward Marvel movie as you’ve seen in the past. I think that it’s gonna be a lot of fun but I think it will be something that hopefully Marvel fans will look at and go, ‘Oh OK, this is a little different, let’s go hard at it.’ And as far as how we are approaching it, it’s time to go to work a little bit, it’s time to make a good Marvel movie, so let’s do that and work hard at it and don’t take things for granted."
We don’t have a release date for Thunderbolts as of yet, but you can currently see Russell in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on Apple TV+. As for Jodie Foster, she’ll appear in the fourth season of True Detective on HBO; that premieres on January 24.
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