This is a huge exaggeration, though. Between Marvel and DC, there’s about 6-8 films released yearly. That comes to a small percentage compared to all films released during a calendar year.
Yes. Of course. And this is part of my point. They release 6-8 films a year, and yet, they dominate any discussion about film.
No one is saying good movies are no longer being made. Or there aren't great artists out there who don't have interesting thing to say or are pushing cinematic boundaries. Of course they are. They always will be. That is never in threat of going away.
This is about movie going culture. This is about the how movies break into the public consciousness and...matter. Get people talking or thinking or craving something different.
And I believe what Scorsese's concern is, is regarding these sorts of people. The average film goer. Not the freaks. Not the obsessives. We'll always find things of interest. But he believes, as do I, that art only matters as much as it can penetrate into the passive movie fans conscience. They are the one's needing convincing of films greatness. Of what art can do. And the stagnation of the last two decades of cinema, where almost all of the oxygen in the room is getting sucked away by these 6-8 films a year, has created a climate where no one really cares anymore. I can't think of a time when movie discussion, fandom, criticism or just general movie blather, has been more empty and devoid of ideas or love or passion. Every conversation is the ****ing exact same thing, because every conversation is about the same small pool of films.
And, while I've no doubt this point is arguable, these films are almost always the worst kind of shit. Not because they are about super heroes (because, of course, good movies can be made about ANYTHING), but because authorship of these films has become so diluted due to studio interference, and IP issues and all other sorts of extraneous meddling. There is now just too much money being invested in these projects for them to ever be anything but faceless piles of shit. You (understandably) are not going to take artistic risks when you've got hundreds of millions of dollars on line.
By comparison, I know for a fact there are over 200 Giallo released from the 60’s until the late 80’s.
All those films and they hardly amount to more than a cultural blip. It's not about quantity. Or quality. It's about exposure and how they affect the culture around them. And giallo's have really only tangentially touched the lives of the world outside of the film freaks.
Ask a random person what the last giallo they saw was, and explain their expression to me.
So they’re hardly “blotting out the sky”
This is obvious hyperbole. They aren't blotting out the sky. But if we replace the word 'sky' with 'critical discussion', ya, that's what they are doing. There is good reason critical discourse (about films that have an effect on popular culture) has fallen into a dumpster the last twenty years. You need to have something to talk about. Superhero movies, at least as they currently and predominantly exist, hardly offer this.
They are, however, dominating the box office, which I had thought no one here cared about anyways.
Nah, the dismissals towards box office, at least the ones coming from my lips, have always exclusively dealt with using box office returns as a metric of a films worth. Which, I'm completely correct on.
Of course I care about box office returns. They dictate what ends up getting green lit. They block the productions of things which don't seem like safe bets. As long as ridiculous sums of money are being used to produce films, I am forced into the position to care about how much good one's make, because if they don't recoup their losses, those movies won't get made anymore.
Except Blood and Honey. That was surprisingly crowded. And awful.
Of course it was awful. And of course it was crowded.