After decades of affiliation in one way or another, Martin Scorsese has finally officially joined the Star Wars galaxy, as the new The Mandalorian and Grogu trailer reveals that the iconic filmmaker will have a voice role in the new film. While this is an interesting bit of casting news, the Star Wars social media accounts decided to attempt to cash-in on the goodwill such a move might bring and instead inadvertently undid it all by attempting to “meme it.” Allow me to explain…
To a whole generation of perpetually online, predominantly male audiences, Martin Scorsese is still recognized in 2026 as the guy who said “Marvel movies aren’t cinema” back in 2019. The throwaway quote from an interview, in which the filmmaker equated MCU movies to being more akin to theme park attractions than actual films, gained a huge amount of traction online and became a weird sort of zeitgeist-capturing moment. It led to people debating the validity of his critique in all sorts of weird ways, and one of the chief results of this was the birth of the “absolute cinema” meme, which is a black-and-white image of Scorsese with his hands up and the quote in bold at the bottom.
All of this has honestly been pretty cringe-inducing for a long time, especially because it feels like an overwhelming majority of the people engaging in the discourse have remained deliberately and vehemently ignorant of Scorsese’s actual cultural significance as not only a filmmaker but also as a film preservationist. To reduce one of the defining voices of the cinematic landscape for the past fifty years to simply viewing him through the lens of his opinion on Disney’s latest superhero flick is, honestly, insulting.
So what does any of this have to do with Star Wars? Well, in a perfect world, nothing. But in the world we live in, everything.
Jon Favreau, the director of The Mandalorian and Grogu, is quite literally a founding architect of the MCU. He directed the first Iron Man film, which kick-started and laid out the blueprint for the entire cinematic universe that followed, and he’s acted in dozens of these things at this point. So, Favreau getting Scorsese to come play a role in his Star Wars movie feels already a bit pointed, but the Star Wars social media account made sure to underline the connection, sharing the official breaking news that Scorsese’s voice is indeed in the trailer, by quoting the god-awful meme itself: “absolute cinema.”
What makes all of this even more maddening is that it honestly is neat that Scorsese is in a Star Wars, just for vastly different reasons than are being emphasized here. Scorsese is a longtime friend and collaborator of George Lucas’ and was among the first people to ever see the earliest cuts of Lucas’ original 1977 film. He was infamously a part of the director’s screening that Lucas had of a preliminary first-cut of the film, with other filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma.
So the fact that after all this time, Scorsese is now officially a part of the larger franchise is pretty cool, and should have netted Favreau and co. some easy points with fans who have remained skeptical about this movie. However, as with many of the marketing stunts pulled in the lead-up to Mandalorian and Grogu, the team went about this in the worst way possible.