The inexhaustible conversation about whether comic book films are any good obscures discussion about the future of cinema itself
While the so-called debate between Marvel-heads and ageing film directors continues to be funny, and will remain funny for as long as there are adult babies still screaming and refusing to surrender their shiny superhero playthings, it is to be hoped that the ‘discourse’ can move on in the coming weeks and months. Interviewers will always be able to find another cantankerous movie guy who has nothing to gain career-wise from kissing Disney backside, but it’s pointless to pretend that this argument is between two wholly discrete factions. If the media could actually look beyond headline-creating soundbites – if there were some genuine care about the direction that cinema is heading in – we could stand to learn a lot from a generation of filmmakers whose artistic contributions to cinema can feel like they already belong to another world.
This, of course, is the news - for those of you so blessed as to be unfamiliar with this story - that this week Francis Ford Coppola (80) and Ken Loach (83) joined Martin Scorsese (76) in criticising a bunch of action films geared at adolescents. Indeed, after the Palme d’Or-winning director of Taxi Driver said Marvel films aren’t cinema, the Palme d’Or-winning director of Apocalypse Now called Marvel movies “despicable”, while the Palme d’Or-winning director of The Wind That Shakes the Barley and I, Daniel Blake called them “boring”. In return, the Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Highest Body Count-winning director of Slither, James Gunn, lashed out at Coppola and the internet went ballistic once more.
While there is of course an element of old-man-yells-at-cloud to this story – because it’s true that the world has moved on from a time when a two and a half hour movie about the Vietnam war could gross $150M – we could stand to learn more from these directors who still cherish film as a collective art form. The question of where cinema goes now, as the rise of Netflix and the dominance of Disney continue to squeeze out mid-budget dramas, is an important one – and we won’t answer it by engaging in a battle of putdowns.
“The question of where cinema goes now, as the rise of Netflix and the dominance of Disney continue to squeeze out mid-budget dramas, is an important one”
Loach did call Marvel films boring, and I agree with him, but a far more interesting charge that he made was at an industrial level. His claim that “it’s about making a commodity which will make a profit for a big corporation” is incontrovertible: Marvel factory-produces films according to a formula that works. That means that the studio is now in a position where it has planned out the next ‘phase’ of its output, with a release date secured for as far off as three years from now for the fourth Thor film, and a Black Panther sequel planned for 2022. The formula for success rests on, among other things, leveraging pre-existing IP, so that audiences are already familiar with some of these characters, and cross-pollinating the movies’ storylines with each other so as to get return spectators. It is inarguable that there are downsides to this dominance for other films: original movies, with characters that audiences don’t know before sitting down in the dark, probably fare less well commercially than they used to. To take one metric: there were four original films among the top 10 films of 2009, and there are none in the top 10 for 2019 (save for two Chinese films that made 99 per cent of their money domestically). That is alarming for people who believe in cinema as a storytelling form.
It seems to me that a culture of binge-watching, fostered by Netflix, where characters tend to develop over long series of 10 hours or more, may have eroded people’s willingness or ability to invest in new characters, from scratch, over a two hour period. How do filmmakers counter that, if it’s the case, with the means that are available to them?
“It seems to me that a culture of binge-watching, fostered by Netflix, where characters tend to develop over long series of 10 hours or more, may have eroded people’s willingness or ability to invest in new characters”
The way the debate has been mounted, then, is detracting from the very real concerns that could be highlighted. But we’re still not asking these figureheads the right questions, or perhaps enough questions. For instance, the hyper-masculinity of the back-and-forth so far is notable: old men have been asked about films by younger men, and the younger men of the internet have popped off in return. (There are many millions of female fans of Marvel, of course, but on the whole the franchise has tended to focus on male characters: the first standalone female film was Captain Marvel, 10 years after Iron Man) It might be worth asking Scorsese et al for their thoughts on inclusive cinema – after all, Marvel is just starting to make inroads on that count, with Chloe Zhao and Cate Shortland helming two of the new films. What have these directors seen, over the course of their careers, that might pertain to the #MeToo movement? This isn’t a question of blaming, or demanding accountability from, these men, but of ensuring that male directors and heads of studio are involved in the conversation and made to think about their work in these terms.
As things now stand, the whole hoo-ha profits Marvel, which has legions of supporters and makes the cultural weather. It’s heartening that there’s a pushback against the monopoly of Disney from people who have generally worked outside the system, but the more gritty, less sexy question of where art films are headed in the current climate, remains.
