Jodie Foster: Superhero Movies a Phase That’s Lasted Too Long.

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“It’s a phase. It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases,” Foster said on the matter. “Hopefully people will be sick of it soon. The good ones — like ‘Iron Man,’ ‘Black Panther,’ ‘The Matrix’ — I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s not why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.”


Conjecture: The hypertrophy of hero movie in the cinema grows from the same root as the hypertrophy of Youth Lit among adults. They are a symptom of the same cause.

Yeah, I've generally been a defender of the MCU stuff, particularly the early stuff. I think those are going to stand up, and the people dumping on that are going to end up looking like the people dumping on all sorts of other generationally beloved genre classics decades from now.

BUT

It has certainly become all the things the critics thought it always was, and yeah, I don't think much of hyper-fandom in general. It's not all (or even mostly) a superhero film thing, it happens all over the place. The getting super invested in fictional couples, mad when a story takes a turn we don't like, and so on. There's a quality to that fandom that makes the production of its objects feel ethically similar to a casino, feeding people's addictions in unhealthy ways.

Marvel is cancer on the healthy body of cinema.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Nah.

Phase I was an object lesson in how to franchise, world build, generate good will, build hype, and deliver to expectations. All those disparate threads that tied together, goofy premise multiplied by goofy premise, and yet it formed a whole. I wanted to hate those film, but I couldn't. However, for me, Marvel ended with Phase I.



Yes, I am still watching The Boys and Invincible, so I am not checked out of watching capes. However, I cannot imagine being Mozart and hearing the crowd scream for another rendition of Hot Cross Buns. "But I wrote this nice sonata..." "No, we want Baby Shark da da dadada dada!" Get Mozart off the stage and bring on The Wiggles!


We're trapped in adolescent fantasies, which is fine for children, but must all stories be made for children? Must we always be laboring to elevate stories about "purple man looks for magic rocks to get wishes"?

If I want a product versus a piece of art, I'd rather watch an 80s/90s HK film. At least they have a soul.

Didnt know the Matrix was a superhero movie, lol.

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In one aspect of his reality, the reality in which most humans live, Neo can fly and stop bullets with his mind. In this avatistic position of power he can also bring the dead back to life in the other aspect of his reality (i.e., Trinity), the so-called "real-world" of Zion and the Nebuchadnezzar. Yeah, it's a super-hero movie.

Matrix really isn’t a super hero film.

As to the point of Goster, without reading the article, she isn’t wrong. Super Hero Movies have kind of become stagnant.

Jodie would never lie to us

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Obviously I wouldn't agree (at least not about all of it), but I also wouldn't bother to disagree with something as personal or subjective as this too much, either. We've been over it and we're at our furthest impasse, probably.

The part I was saying "nah" to wasn't you disliking them, it was that the cancerous analogy implies some kind of damage to the "body of cinema."

I don't think there's much evidence that Marvel is hurting the cinema you like. I don't think it's crowding out the stuff you enjoy or causing people not to watch it who otherwise would have. If Marvel is as insipid as you say, so alien to cinema as you love and understand it, then there's little reason to think the people who watch (love!) it would be watching "better" films instead, or that those multiplexes would be full of people watching anything particular avante garde in its place. The MCU isn't crowding out daring, experimental cinema, it's just crowding out other blockbuster franchises. And even then, probably not a lot.

Yeah, I just can't understand how somebody can think Marvel movies are amazing. Especially if they've seen something else other than Marvel movies. I don't mind people enjoying them, be it as a 'guilty pleasure' or just 'mindless entertainment'. But when people start pretending these movies are somehow great, I give up.

But they do. The Marvelization of cinema is ongoing. The otherwise fine Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves suffers from the Marvel syndrome, too. It has a few moments picked straight from Marvel's toolbox, and I hate it.

Sure because most cinema I like is as unlike Marvel as it gets. But Marvel hurts cinema in general. It sets dangerous trends and teaches the young generation what to expect from the medium of film, warping and ruining their tastes from the get-go. It teaches people that insincerity is what they should crave, among others. And that irony is somehow inseparable from emotional moments. To be clear, there's Marvel and then there's Marvel. It's astounding but they are getting WORSE by the year. Something like Marvels is so infinitely bad that the terrible The Avengers feels like a good movie in comparison. There are notable exceptions to the terrible quality of Marvel films but they're few and far between. But I think one thing that the better Marvel vehicles do is they do not sheer away from emotional or sincere moments, no matter how cheesy or forced they are anyway. Take Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, one of the better Marvel efforts, which manages to smuggle moments of genuine sincerity, a rarity in Marvel movies. Warlock's arc is predictable and on the nose, but I believe in its sincerity. The whole thing still reeks, but at this point, it might be my obstinateness rather than the matter of fact. But with most other Marvel movies, it stinks for real.

Oh, I'm not expecting people to go avant-garde now. But look at the gargantuan American spectacles of the 50s. I'm not particularly fond of them either. But they were just on another level. You can say a lot of bad things about Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. For the record, I don't like it. But you can't deny it sports amazing Technicolor visuals and practical special effects. At least that. But Marvel films lack both. The best you can get is not aesthetics but computer-generated backgrounds that combine gold and blue in a fine but boring and overused manner. But most Marvel films don't even have that. I'd rather take the analog blues of Hong Kong's cheapos than lay my eyes on any more of Marvel's digitalized atrocities.

Or take the mass-produced American movies from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. They had some studio system expert directors making them. But even the vast majority of the movies made by anonymous non-auteurs is much better than your average Marvel. The average quality was high and the viewers were conditioned to that quality. They demanded it. The producers demanded it, too. Some people say that superhero films are modern-day westerns. I don't really agree, but let's play along for a moment. Do we have any superhero movies on the level of The Man from Laramie or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance? Of course not. But we have the superhero movie that's as close to westerns as it gets - Logan. Now that was very good. And it was Marvel! But not Marvel Studios. Marvel Studios is the problem, not the fact the movie is based on the Marvel comics. Logan could've been bad. But it wasn't. It was very nice. But hey, it's James Mangold, so he pulled it off, alright. So I'd say there's potential there, but Marvel Studios is too interested in money to see it. Outside of the MCU universe might be a tip, though. It also means outside of the constrictions that make Marvel bad as far as I'm concerned.

It's not about crowding out anything. It's about setting the bar low and accustoming viewers to expect very little. And then other studios see Marvel films bring lots of money so they will ape whatever Marvel does. And thus the Marvelization of cinema begins. It's small things but they matter. And those small things can ruin a movie, too.

I think there's a pretty wide berth between "amazing" and "cancer."

I dunno, if I'm being perfectly blunt (and I think we know each other well enough by now that I can be), I think it probably does bug you that people enjoy them. I think many of the people who lay into the MCU do so because they dislike the idea of the kind of person that likes them.

This confuses me. I know there are a lot of quips, but there is no lack of emotional sincerity. Frankly, as they've gotten worse, it's correlated with them becoming increasingly cloying.

Aye, Guardians 3 is one of the first things that came to mind, really. I admit, Rocket's stuff got to me. It's a little shameless, but it works.

I'll take that, as far as compromises go.

Of course, even when people do that--Christopher Nolan--he gets pilloried in much the same way.

Anyway, I prefer all that, too (with the caveat that some things can't and shouldn't be practical effects, and films about superheroes are probably chief among them), but again, the scope of my disagreement is extremely narrow: it is simply that they are not harming the cinema you know and love. They're taking from other crowd-pleasing blockbusters, and bringing people in who otherwise wouldn't go to the movies at all, but I don't think they're training people not to love sophisticated cinema who otherwise would've been receptive towards it.

Frankly, I think of it more like popular fiction: the influx of people who started reading because of Harry Potter are not people who would've been reading Dostoyevsky if only they'd been started on something better. They're largely people who wouldn't be reading otherwise. And while some of them go on to read disposable YA fiction, those people were never going to read more serious literature, and obviously some of them come to love literature in all its forms after starting there. I think the same is true of the MCU. I think it introduces lots of people to cinema, some of which go on to appreciate it deeply, but the larger share of those who don't were unlikely to anyway.

All I can point out is that this is what always happens: things are derided as cheap crowd pleasers when they come out and then a couple of generations later they're looked on as classics, much better than <whatever's popular now>. I'm not saying it's exactly wrong, but it seems important that literally every generation ends up doing this to some degree.

My response boils down to two things:

1) The "Marvelization" applies almost exclusively to other films that were already similar to it.

2) It's a short-term thing, as the sudden fall from grace we've seen indicates. Which was always predictable and I think has already made a lot of the hand-wringing, as if this was going to dominate cinema for half a century or something, look really overdramatic and myopic.

Yes, it's true that a lot of films that were considered disposable fluff by the old cinematic guard at the time, were eventually heralded as classics. For obvious reasons. And it has happened for multiple generations.


But my assumption is that it's not going to happen here. Twenty years from now Avengers films are not suddenly going to start appearing on Sight and Sound lists. And I even wonder how much they will appear on more lowbrow lists made from votes of those who saw these things when they were younger.


Why? Well, in the past, these audience pleasers that eventually became celebrated as classics, were at least created as passion projects by the directors. And people feel that difference as time goes on. Stephen Spielberg is not Jon Favreau (and he would be one of the better ones of these guns for hire movies). The only ones I can possibly see rising above this problem are the Guardians films because of James Gunn. I personally don't like them, but they are clearly films made by a person, not a committee.


Secondly, and probably most importantly, film simply doesn't matter so much anymore. It isn't the same kind of cultural event which binds people together as it once did. Maybe a film like Barbie is proving we aren't moving towards a completely unavoidable decent into cultural apathy.....but most superhero movies, while insanely succesful, do not seem to be shifting hearts and minds in the way a movie like ET did back in the day.


Now I of course could be proved wrong on all of this two decades from now. But, probably not.

MCU's eventual place in cinema history will be next to other hugely successful series like the superhero serial Flash Gordon (1936). We've always had assembly line, crowd pleasing fluff since the silent film days. They use to call them 'serials' and they were panned way back then by so called 'artist', but that didn't stop them from being made and making a ton of money...and yet cinema went on. So MCU is nothing to worry about folks, watch it or trash it, your choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_film

I think we had this exact discussion once before. Certainly, that could all be true, and your rationales are thoughtful and reasonable. But I assume the arguments people had decades ago were also reasonable. I don't think they were just being thoughtless old grumps (well, some of them). If there were not always a reasonable case to be made for why such-and-such is different, the mistake would not recur.

But, I gather from the cultural event stuff you mentioned that you're not saying the MCU isn't part of this cycle, but that the cycle itself is over due to cultural fragmentation. Maybe so. I actually think that's the better argument, of the two, for whatever it's worth.

I will respond more granularly to one thing: the idea of passion projects. I think that makes sense, but I also think we'll always find that in hindsight, too. It's not hard to imagine people looking back at the Russo Bros, for example, as being genuinely passionate. They got started on comedies and were involved in some of the most formally inventive and deconstructive stuff on Community, for example. If they come to occupy some higher wrung of regard in a few decades, it's easy to see how it would look retrospectively obvious. I think you're right about Gunn as being one of the best candidates, also.

Anyway, my best guess is that almost all of the MCU will be seen as fun but disposable, a more popular version of the Universal Movie Monsters of old, but that a few of the film and storylines will stick around. I've got a few guesses about what they are, too, and I'm more confident about which it would be than I am about whether any will. Regardless, probably not in the Star Wars sense; I agree they probably won't be on whatever golem of a list AFI's putting out in 2050, provided such things haven't all devolved into cultural clickbait, but in some meaningful way. But, same caveat: could be wrong.

Very true---I'm actually surprised that there aren't more literal contemporary serials around, given the rise of short term attention spans with the Tiktok generations.

(To note, however, I like these old serials, just like I enjoy watching instructional shorts from the 1950s.)

Don't you even dare compare Les Vampires to Marvel movies. LOL.

But is it technically a Christmas movie? Technically?