There’s a new Martin Scorsese movie coming out, so of course it’s time for another round of the esteemed filmmaker’s King Lear-like rants against Marvel Entertainment and superhero movies as an existential threat to the art of cinema, Western civilization, and the very act of moviegoing itself. In a recent GQ interview to promote Killers Of The Flower Moon, Scorsese reiterates points he made in 2019 while promoting his snorefest The Irishman. Marvel films are corrupting the audience by addicting them to “theme park movies.” There will be “generations now that think movies are only that—that’s what movies are.” Studios, he says “are not really interested any longer in supporting individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts on a big budget. And what’s happened now is that they’ve pigeonholed it to what they call indies.”
Howl. Howl. Howl. Howl. Howl.
There are plenty of reasons to be appalled by Marvel movies, especially in their unfocused and overproduced recent incarnations. Marty may not have noticed, but the guaranteed audience for these films is already tiring of them, and has been shrinking drastically. The Eternals and Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania were outright flops and a lot of fans seem to have grudge-watched movies like Thor: Love And Thunder and Dr. Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. Meanwhile the DCEU continues to be a mish-mash of money-losing and wildly unpopular films, fluke successes (Wonder Woman and Aquaman), and movies that perform regardless of quality because they feature (the) Batman.
Scorsese’s fight is nothing new
But to act like “theme park” movies are a new phenomenon deserving of fresh and universal agita is disingenuous coming from a filmmaker who has had Steven Spielberg and George Lucas on speed dial for over 40 years. The war Scorsese wants filmmakers to wage was either lost decades ago or maybe never existed. It arguably began in earnest in 1977, when the freakish holdover success of Star Wars drove William Friedkin’s dark action noir masterpiece Sorcerer out of theaters so C3PO could gobble up more screens. The battle pretty much ended almost literally in a cloud of dust by 1980, when Michael Cimino’s anti-capitalist Western Heaven’s Gate lost 20 percent of its running time just before a wide release so disastrous it was said to have destroyed United Artists, the studio funding the film.
Scorsese, more than anybody, ought to know what a longstanding “problem” the theme-parkification of cinema is because he’s always had trouble finding an audience. Raging Bull is hailed today as a signature masterpiece, but it only earned $24 million at the box office on an $18 million budget. It was bracketed on either side by two of Scorsese’s many outright fiscal fiascos: the anti-musical New York New York (or Raging Bull with a saxophone) and the disturbing Robert De Niro/Jerry Lewis vehicle The King Of Comedy, about obsessive fandom.
New York New York came out in 1977—the year of Star Wars. Raging Bull flopped in 1980—the year of The Empire Strikes Back. The King Of Comedy failed in a marketplace dominated by E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. In other words, Scorsese, who was in the process of becoming briefly unbankable, must have noticed what was going on. And as the studios turned away completely from the artist-driven and bespoke production models of the 1970s toward the high-concept escapism Marty’s personal pals Steven and George were pioneering and imposing upon the moviegoing world, the serious movie artists of an earlier age—not just Scorsese but also Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Friedkin, Cimino, Peter Bogdanovich, Paul Mazursky—began to dwindle.
Scorsese’s response was to briefly return to his indie origins, with the micro-budgeted black comedy After Hours that (barely) became the first box office success he’d known since Taxi Driver almost a decade earlier. The indie world he adjudges as creatively inadequate in his latest GQ interview rescued his career, and then he partnered with major stars Tom Cruise and Paul Newman and saved himself some more with The Color Of Money, his terrible but Oscar-winning follow-up to Robert Rossen’s downbeat classic The Hustler.
Scorsese dreams of an era that never was...
There was no era where the major studios were systemically willing to underwrite “personal” films on the blockbuster scale Scorsese fantasizes about. When they were coming off hits like The Godfather or M*A*S*H or The Exorcist, a handful of creators got to roll briefly on an epic scale with house money and borrowed dice. And when that didn’t work out, the house did what it always does: it cut off their line of credit. The “big budgets” Scorsese demands be released to personal filmmakers are the cause of the crisis, not the effect. And the cartoon approach to filmmaking Scorsese decries was imposed on the universe by some of his closest friends for a blasé and self-evident reason: because it reliably returns on the investment.
Scorsese may not fully realize this because out of all his contemporaries he has been the lucky one. The toxic masculinity his movies either examine or celebrate depending on your point of view has long been taken for artistic seriousness by the testosterone-fueled sociopaths who invented, promulgated, and ran Hollywood for decades. So Scorsese continues to get funded at a scale superior filmmakers like Coppola and Altman could only dream about. He’s had a couple of major hits—Shutter Island and The Wolf Of Wall Street, released during peak DiCaprio, that are among his biggest films. But each smash or break even has been offset by flops like Gangs Of New York, Hugo, Silence, and The Irishman. Still, Scorsese gets funded at a high level the way Michelangelo did—because his name confers prestige on the patron—and so he continues to create and fail at a level a younger and hungrier talent like Damien Babylon Chazelle will likely only get to taste once.
None of this is a recent development and none of this is Marvel’s fault. Marvel’s Kevin Feige merely perfected a pre-existing system. Even if you’re a Marvel hater, it must be grudgingly admitted that escapist fantasies have always been a large part of what moviegoing is about, and that the MCU has given a great deal of pleasure to a whole lot of moviegoers in a crisis-haunted time.
Scorsese is 80 years old, and it galls him to know that the Marvel films through Avengers: Endgame represent a signature cultural event in the cinema of our time. When Marty is gone, and an entire body of work steeped in the belief that toxic masculinity is the organizing principle of the cosmos is reassessed, it will be interesting to see if his highly personal oeuvre can stake the same claim.