Are Marvel Movies Cinema?

Anyway, I continue to agree with a lot of the general thrust of what Marty says, while still thinking he consistently overstates the position (and that people in general fail to appreciate the orthogonal art form that is popular culture).

After further searching, I found one site that claims Netflix paid 120 million for it. Another site says that it cost a whopping 225 million to produce.



I guess I'm used to looking at box office profits to see if a movie was financially successful, but what with all of the other income streams like netflix, action characters, and dvd sales that a movie can generate, it's quite hard.



That said, I think this is what Scorsese doesn't like. He made this great movie with big name stars, and it can't even get time in theaters. Then he's looking at Marvel movies that are just killing it!

Here is the piece in question. I think it's worth noting how he's articulating the problem better than using reductive phrasing like "Marvel movies aren't real movies", instead outlining how going too far in the other direction by redefining all films as "content" and using certain algorithm-driven services to distribute them indifferently like any other consumer product is the real problem (Marvel discourse is ultimately just a symptom of that same issue). This is a fair point of concern considering the recent increase in use of streaming services due to the pandemic - if they are your main means of seeking out new films to watch then they should do more to encourage a broadening of one's horizons rather than leading one down potentially narrow rabbit holes (especially since one could argue that part of the reason the pro-Marvel crowd got so intense over Scorsese's original remarks is because of a comparative lack of cinematic literacy that put an inordinate amount of importance onto Marvel films in the first place when compared unfavourably against the usual age-old classics).

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2007 made me believe in movies again. I have been losing faith ever since.

Marvel is a gleaming mistake. It's proof that studios can occasionally make competent stupid movies. Is this a revelation? Billion dollar Marvel movies are like a billion dollar cheeseburger. For a billion or 500 million or whatever the size is of the pile of cash that they throw at these products, they should be able to competently engineer a cheeseburger. That Hollywood has so much difficulty pulling off this trick shows how bad they are at their jobs and how much contempt they have for the viewing public.

Anyone would think they don't make movies other than blockbusters these days reading some of these comments.
SciFi was around in the 50s as it is today.
Gangster movies were around in the 50s as they are today.
Based on real events movies were around in the 50s, as they are today.
What has changed is the audience.
I'm sure the parents of those watching those films in the 50s reacted pretty much how some are in this thread.
Whether people like it or not we are in the 21st century and movies are primarily aimed at the biggest audience, the 18-30s.
As someone said in a previous post, you don't have to watch them if you don't like them.
Not all of us want to live in the past watching old BW movies like westerns, WW2 war films, and dated SciFi films with props made of toilet roll tubes held up by wires we can see.
It all comes down to personal taste and we all have the tech at hand to show us what we want to see.

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I'm confused, why would anyone care about how financially successful a film is? That is certainly no way to gauge the quality of a film.

^I presume it fits the idea that the only way more films like it could be made at all is if they prove financially viable (and also the narrative that is apparently being constructed that this is all sour grapes from Scorsese over how his most recent films struggle to compete with modern blockbusters)

It's about more than just what gets made in the present but also about preserving past work for future generations. There's a reason that the bulk of Scorsese's latest op-ed revolves around Federico Fellini, an old master of cinema who went from being a director whose every film was an event to one who struggled to get U.S. distribution for his final film even with Scorsese's backing around the same time that films like Batman and Home Alone were dominating the box office and setting the standard for the next few decades. As a result, it's no wonder that he's thrown himself into projects involving film restoration and preservation for international and classic films. "Don't watch them if you don't like them" is a weaksauce response if the problem is that our ability to choose something we do like is effectively threatened by such an aggressively indifferent business model - it's why Scorsese highlights services like the Criterion Channel or MUBI that do more than just settle for an algorithm and actually curate film programs for their users to follow. This is certainly a matter that goes beyond a mere difference in personal taste - it's essentially the future of cinema at stake and that can't just be a matter of people looking at the kind of ephemeral spectacles engineered towards delighting core demographics and going "eh, what you gonna do".

Then the people who hold this opinion need to be told it's a nonsense opinion.


Well said.

That is a fair point. The thing is, I think part of the problem is watching non-Marvel-type stuff is an effort, same as reading Moby Dick and Don Quixote. If people don’t make that effort, it’s their problem, but they definitely miss out on a lot, even in the sense that if you don’t know the old classics you often fail to appreciate the tongue-in-cheek references, metafictional turns, insider jokes and much more. Even Mulholland Drive is not fun if you don’t know who Rita Hayworth is and don’t notice the poster in the bathroom or the significance of Laura Harring calling herself ‘Rita’.

It definitely is up to the individual and I am a great and incorrigible lover of all things genre, but I do think it would benefit the entire film industry and human self-understanding, as it were, if a service found the guts to encourage/stimulate users to watch films outside their comfort zone. In that sense, it’s laudable that Scorsese is helping spread the word about the Criterion Channel and MUBI.

Indeed. He's also doing alot more than that. He personally pays for restorations under his 'World Cinema' project. The board of Directors for the World Cinema Project is interesting - some of the biggest blockbuster directors and revered directors to ever have lived are involved in it - Scorsese, Spielberg, PTA, George Lucas, Wes Anderson, FF Coppola, Christopher Nolan, Peter Jackson, Clint Eastwood - because they know how important restoring old international films are.

Like I said in my post, not all modern movies are MCU/DC.

Until we started going into lockdowns last year I wouldn't have watched the likes of The Imitation Game, The Theory Of Everything and Suffragette but I am glad I did as all were extremely good.
Profits are the main thing with any business these days and tastes have changed and Hollywood caters for those tastes.
Thankfully the BFI and other film institutes continue to support the non blockbuster films being made today.
Oh and just to let you know my Blu Ray copy of Iron Man has just been delivered.

Ya know, if he'd said DC isn't cinema, I would probably have let it slide.

There are many ways to gauge the quality of a film, and it seems to me that financial success is the most profitable. Maybe time will be harder on Marvel movies in the future, but I'm pretty sure that Morton Downey's private hot tub party girls are hotter, younger, and more willing than Deniro's.



If that's not success, it's close enough.

That makes zero sense at all. I mean Kurosawa's 'Seven Samurai', undoubtedly one of THE greatest movies of all time, barely made a third of it's budget back at the box office.

'Akira' the anime film was a worldwide flop, not even making a fifth of it's budget on release.

Ingmar Bergman's 'Cries and Whispers' made just 2.5% of it's budget back at the box office.

So it seems to me there is absolutely zero correlation between the quality of a film and it's financial success.

I can understand this. I think it's a lot like jazz. Some of the best musicians in the world play jazz in front of maybe 20 people who are more worried about what's on the menu than what is happening on stage. If taken for technical proficiency alone, they're killing it! Unfortunately, nobody is listening.

Sorry, are you saying nobody has ever watched 'Seven Samurai' ?

Of course people have watched Seven Samurai. Kevin Costner is probably responsible for the majority of them.

It seems that you're looking at this a bit differently from me. I can watch something that I think is simply genius, but I'm quite aware that this is just my subjective interpretation. At the end of the day, I'm not going to stuff seven samurai down the throats of everybody telling them that if they don't agree with me, then they're retards.

Don't know what this means sorry.

I'm struggling to see your point. You claimed that Scorsese was irate that his movie didn't do well at theaters, while other franchises were 'killing it' at the box office. (The Irishman was only ever going to do small runs in Theaters by the way, it was only put in theaters in order to be eligible for awards season, like 'Roma').

At no point did Scorsese think his film wasn't going to match or better those franchise comic book films in theaters.

That is his point! He produced an awesome movie with an all-star cast that got great reviews, but he lost out to movies he feels are just entertainment.

Did Kurosawa feel cheated when seven samurai failed at the box office? I'm guessing he did.

Who are we to judge what is a great movie? You say seven samurai is a great movie, but also admit that it lost money. The plot was good enough, but the actual movie bombed.

It's not up to you or I to define what is great. It's up to the public, and the public has decided that watching Hulk and Thor and Iron man battling it out against Thanos is the shiznit!

How did he lose out? The film signed with Netflix.

No idea. I'd guess at the time of his death, he didn't feel cheated as Seven Samurai was and still is, one of the most revered pieces of cinema of all time.

But is one of the most critically acclaimed, revered pieces of cinema of all time. So the point is clear - box office success means absolutely nothing.

What about films that were not released in theatres in the last year due to the pandemic? Are we not allowed an opinion on them because we can't see their box office numbers? This whole financial success angle is ludicrous. It means nothing.

Are we not the public?

So The Emoji movie is better than Blade Runner because it had a better return at the box office?