Are Marvel Movies Cinema?

Tools    





Yeah, if nothing else it should be obvious these blockbusters are a lot better than many we've had in the past. Have you guys seen Thor: Ragnarok? Because it doesn't at all feel like something focus-grouped to death, or some safe, corporate product. It's delightfully weird. Marvel's taken a lot more chances than they've really had to.

I think people are upset because they've done so well, and as I alluded to earlier, the big screen crowding out thing is probably the only really valid critique here (even though I find it a little precious at the margins). But as far as blockbusters go a lot of these are a heckuva lot better than the standard fare. I'm not sure that's such a bad trade, especially if it sets the tone for mass entertainment (which is going to exist in some form or another, probably) in the future.



The thing isolated becomes incomprehensible
Marty wrote an editorial in the New York Times clarifying his remarks. I've bolded some of the most significant portions since it's a little long:

When I was in England in early October, I gave an interview to Empire magazine. I was asked a question about Marvel movies. I answered it. I said that I’ve tried to watch a few of them and that they’re not for me, that they seem to me to be closer to theme parks than they are to movies as I’ve known and loved them throughout my life, and that in the end, I don’t think they’re cinema.

Some people seem to have seized on the last part of my answer as insulting, or as evidence of hatred for Marvel on my part. If anyone is intent on characterizing my words in that light, there’s nothing I can do to stand in the way.

Many franchise films are made by people of considerable talent and artistry. You can see it on the screen. The fact that the films themselves don’t interest me is a matter of personal taste and temperament. I know that if I were younger, if I’d come of age at a later time, I might have been excited by these pictures and maybe even wanted to make one myself. But I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri.

For me, for the filmmakers I came to love and respect, for my friends who started making movies around the same time that I did, cinema was about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.

It was about confronting the unexpected on the screen and in the life it dramatized and interpreted, and enlarging the sense of what was possible in the art form.

And that was the key for us: it was an art form. There was some debate about that at the time, so we stood up for cinema as an equal to literature or music or dance. And we came to understand that the art could be found in many different places and in just as many forms — in “The Steel Helmet” by Sam Fuller and “Persona” by Ingmar Bergman, in “It’s Always Fair Weather” by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly and “Scorpio Rising” by Kenneth Anger, in “Vivre Sa Vie” by Jean-Luc Godard and “The Killers” by Don Siegel.

Or in the films of Alfred Hitchcock — I suppose you could say that Hitchcock was his own franchise. Or that he was our franchise. Every new Hitchcock picture was an event. To be in a packed house in one of the old theaters watching “Rear Window” was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the picture itself, and it was electrifying.

And in a way, certain Hitchcock films were also like theme parks. I’m thinking of “Strangers on a Train,” in which the climax takes place on a merry-go-round at a real amusement park, and “Psycho,” which I saw at a midnight show on its opening day, an experience I will never forget. People went to be surprised and thrilled, and they weren’t disappointed.

Sixty or 70 years later, we’re still watching those pictures and marveling at them. But is it the thrills and the shocks that we keep going back to? I don’t think so. The set pieces in “North by Northwest” are stunning, but they would be nothing more than a succession of dynamic and elegant compositions and cuts without the painful emotions at the center of the story or the absolute lostness of Cary Grant’s character.

The climax of “Strangers on a Train” is a feat, but it’s the interplay between the two principal characters and Robert Walker’s profoundly unsettling performance that resonate now.

Some say that Hitchcock’s pictures had a sameness to them, and perhaps that’s true — Hitchcock himself wondered about it. But the sameness of today’s franchise pictures is something else again. Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.

They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption.

Another way of putting it would be that they are everything that the films of Paul Thomas Anderson or Claire Denis or Spike Lee or Ari Aster or Kathryn Bigelow or Wes Anderson are not. When I watch a movie by any of those filmmakers, I know I’m going to see something absolutely new and be taken to unexpected and maybe even unnameable areas of experience. My sense of what is possible in telling stories with moving images and sounds is going to be expanded.

So, you might ask, what’s my problem? Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It’s a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever. The equation has flipped and streaming has become the primary delivery system. Still, I don’t know a single filmmaker who doesn’t want to design films for the big screen, to be projected before audiences in theaters.

That includes me, and I’m speaking as someone who just completed a picture for Netflix. It, and it alone, allowed us to make “The Irishman” the way we needed to, and for that I’ll always be thankful. We have a theatrical window, which is great. Would I like the picture to play on more big screens for longer periods of time? Of course I would. But no matter whom you make your movie with, the fact is that the screens in most multiplexes are crowded with franchise pictures.

And if you’re going to tell me that it’s simply a matter of supply and demand and giving the people what they want, I’m going to disagree. It’s a chicken-and-egg issue. If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing, of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.

But, you might argue, can’t they just go home and watch anything else they want on Netflix or iTunes or Hulu? Sure — anywhere but on the big screen, where the filmmaker intended her or his picture to be seen.

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. 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.

For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.
I can't see how anyone would disagree with Marty's words here...
We got to a point where Joker is considered to be a deep and philosophical work of art... That says enough about its competition...



Ami-Scythe's Avatar
A bucket of anxiety
I can't see how anyone would disagree with Marty's words here...
We got to a point where Joker is considered to be a deep and philosophical work of art... That says enough about its competition...
We're friends now and you can't get out of this
__________________
|>
|
Ami-Scythe



The trick is not minding
I enjoyed the Joker, and it did have a thought provoking stance on how mental illness is handled at large, but even then I found it slightly pretentious as it neared the end when it derailed into a cacophony of violence



Films, yes they are, absolutely. But feels like a CGI orgy mostly. Good or bad is mostly dependent on the person or fandom involved. For me personally, i don't care about them at all. Just look at this year, less of them and the quality of movies releasing instantly has gone up. They just suppress good movies coming out because all houses mostly would look at the money they make and go we should do the same, bar A24 and a few other small producers.


The only comic stuff i liked was Deadpool, coz is self-aware at all times, that it is a movie that came out of a comic book. And Nolan's batman, coz you know, Nolan and Bale. The others just take themselves just too seriously and try to deliver something that is a mish-mash of a lot of things, and a whole lot of fluff at the same time.
__________________
My Favorite Films



Films, yes they are, absolutely. But feels like a CGI orgy mostly. Good or bad is mostly dependent on the person or fandom involved. For me personally, i don't care about them at all. Just look at this year, less of them and the quality of movies releasing instantly has gone up. They just suppress good movies coming out because all houses mostly would look at the money they make and go we should do the same, bar A24 and a few other small producers.


The only comic stuff i liked was Deadpool, coz is self-aware at all times, that it is a movie that came out of a comic book. And Nolan's batman, coz you know, Nolan and Bale. The others just take themselves just too seriously and try to deliver something that is a mish-mash of a lot of things, and a whole lot of fluff at the same time.
We did have nine of them...

Alita:Battle Angel
Captain Marvel
Shazam
Avengers Endgame
Hellboy
X-men: Dark Phoenix
Men in Black International
Spiderman: Far From Home
Joker

Like any other genre we have high points and low points. I think the Superhero films are less of an issue than the Kids animated films that come out every week those ,mostly seem to be empty cash grabs.



Yeah. Most of them early in the year. Joker although is a DC movie, the movie floats completely on another plane. Heck I didn't even know this much came out. My childhood was mostly with Tintin and Asterix stuff. So Marvel/DC barely scratch my heart!

I am not liking the way Disney is just re-hashing old stuff time and again. But there are still good animated movies coming out. I lost my body and Klaus just came out this year. Both were great!



Although I might add I don't think both the animated movies are from Hollywood.



█ █ █ █ █
Being "cinema" the art of telling stories through acting, captured by cameras, they are.



Marty wrote an editorial in the New York Times clarifying his remarks. I've bolded some of the most significant portions since it's a little long:
So he basically criticizes modern blockbuster movies because they lack originality. That they are "boilerplate" movies. That is true: movies that cost 200-300 million dollars tend to play it very, very safe and become very unoriginal. Some Marvel movies like The Avengers are perhaps the ultimate example of boilerplate movies: they take the basic elements of action/adventure stories and the basic method of executing those stories in movies (thanks to the likes of Kurosawa) and invest a lot of resources to produce a highly refined/processed product for the widest audience possible. They take almost zero risks in making those movies.

However, to be cinema I don't think you don't need to be original. Otherwise, Scorcese's movies over the past 20 years are not cinema either because his later movies tend to feel much like remakes of his earlier ones. When I watched The Irishman, for example, it felt about as original as Captain Marvel or Black Panther.

I would agree with him that there has been a decline in artistic freedom and hence in the release of spectacular Hollywood movies over the past 20 years. Movies like The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, and even Gladiator are miles ahead of recent blockbusters. I guess the reason is that now audiences have access to a much wider range of entertainment like TV shows and videogames so to attract audiences the movie industry has to use well-known franchises: a more original blockbuster movie released in 2019 like Alita flopped for instance, while super generic movies made billions.

I can't see how anyone would disagree with Marty's words here...
We got to a point where Joker is considered to be a deep and philosophical work of art... That says enough about its competition...
Well, to me the Joker felt kinda like a less nuanced and more aggressive version of Taxi Driver, which is Scorsese's best film. I think people might be looking at older movies with excessive nostalgia.

Saying that movies like Marvel's superhero movies are not cinema and then, implicitly, claiming that gangster movies are cinema is a form of genre-oriented prejudice. I personally view the gangster genre as not one of the most artistically accomplished genres of film: it is a genre of movies based on the attraction of the escapist idea of breaking society's rules by inflicting coercion upon others. Essentially, they are a sociopathic fantasy genre. Superhero movies are actually not very different: they also a genre based on the escapism of coercing people but coercion is justified in that people who are coerced are "the bad guys" and the main characters use colorful costumes while gangsters use brown/black costumes. In a way, superhero movies are morally simplified gangster movies.



Registered User
I think he's angry that The Irishman was an incredible box office flop. From what I can gather, it cost 150 million to make, and grossed a bit over half a million at the box office before being put on netflix.



In other words, nobody is answering his calls. Spinal Tap's smell the glove tour was a resounding success in comparison.



I think he's angry that The Irishman was an incredible box office flop. From what I can gather, it cost 150 million to make, and grossed a bit over half a million at the box office before being put on netflix.



In other words, nobody is answering his calls. Spinal Tap's smell the glove tour was a resounding success in comparison.
Why would The Irishman have anything other than poor box office numbers? It was a Netflix film with a limited release.



Registered User
Why would The Irishman have anything other than poor box office numbers? It was a Netflix film with a limited release.

I tried looking online for how much money it made, and it doesn't seem to have been a financial success.



Maybe the real question is why a Scorsese movie starring Deniro, Pacino, and Pesci get treated like it was a Care bears sequel.



I tried looking online for how much money it made, and it doesn't seem to have been a financial success.
If you're looking at box office, that's probably right, but Netflix purchased it, so I assume it got some big lump sum from that. Not sure if you're including that or not, but the finances for those streaming-funded originals are completely different than historical releases.