Francis Ford Coppola Calls Marvel Movies “Despicable” and James Gunn Responds
Legendary director Francis Ford Coppola is backing up Martin Scorsese’s criticism of Marvel movies but takes things a bit further by calling them “despicable.”
Here’s what he had to say at a recent event thanks to Yahoo! News:
"When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he's right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration. I don't know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again. Martin was kind when he said it's not cinema. He didn't say it's despicable, which I just say it is."
I assume that Coppola hasn’t watched any of these Marvel films either. These guys are forming options on something they aren’t really familiar with, and that’s not really fair. Are these filmmakers feeling contempt for these Marvel films because of the success that they’ve had?
We do know, though, that there is knowledge, inspiration, and enlightenment in these Marvel movies. Is the fact that these films are fun and exciting to watch blinding them from the story being told and what the characters of these stories are going through? I guess they’d be able to answer that question if they watched the movies.
Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn had a great response to Coppola’s criticism of Marvel movies in the following Instagram post:
In case you want a reminder of what Scorsese previously shared about Marvel movies, he said:
“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not 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.”
He later added:
"The value of a film that’s like a theme park film, for example, the Marvel type pictures where the theaters become amusement parks, that’s a different experience,” he said. “As I was saying earlier, it's not cinema, it’s something else. Whether you go for that or not, it is something else and we shouldn’t be invaded by it. And so that’s a big issue, and we need the theater owners to step up for that to allow theaters to show films that are narrative films.”
I actually really liked Kevin Smith’s defense of Marvel films when he said:
“My feeling is, Martin Scorsese never sat in a movie theater with his dad and watched the movies of Steven Spielberg in the early '80s or George Lucas in the late '70s. He didn't feel that sense of magic and wonder. I can still step into one of those comic book movies, divorce myself of that fact that I do this for a living, release, and my dead dad is back for a minute, for two hours,. And it's personal for a lot of the audience. You know, and we're not arguing whether or not it counts as cinema. I guarantee you there's something he enjoyed with his parents, like a musical — I bet you some cats would say, 'A musical is not really cinema,' but Martin Scorsese grew up on musicals, and I bet they mean a lot to him. These [Marvel] movies come from a core. They come from a happy childhood. And they're reflections of a happy childhood. He's not wrong, but at the same time, neither are we for loving those movies. And they are cinema."
What do you all think about Francis Ford Coppola’s comments on Marvel movies?