Attention Martin Scorsese: Nobody Cares About “Cinema”

Uh-oh, he’s at it again. Have you ever seen that meme with the newspaper clipping from The Simpsons? The “Old Man Yells at Cloud” one? Well, Martin Scorsese is that “Old Man” and Comic Book Movies are his “Cloud.”

Back in 2019, while promoting The Irishman, Scorsese railed on comic book movies, dismissing them as not being cinema, with the implication they are a lesser brand of film. I wrote a lengthy retort to this back then, and I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here, but I thought I’d never have to revisit that argument again. I was wrong.

You see, Mr. Scorsese has another film coming out, Killers of the Flower Moon, due in theaters October 20, and he is once again on the promotional circuit. And once again, he is taking aim at comic book films. This time he is issuing a rousing call to action in an interview with British GQ (quote courtesy of Deadline):

 “The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture. Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those—that’s what movies are. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. Let’s see what you got. Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true because we’ve got to save cinema.”

I could pretty much stop the editorial here, because Scorsese blows his own argument out of the water. Hey, Marty, you do know that Christopher Nolan made not one, not two but three comic book movies? They all feature a man dressed up as a bat beating the snot out of people. In one, he punched a clown! What a hack!

But Scorsese didn’t stop there:

“…what I mean is that it’s manufactured content. It’s almost like AI making a film. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you? Aside from a kind of consummation of something and then eliminating it from your mind, your whole body, you know? So what is it giving you?”

There is a lot of address here in Scorsese’s comments. But let me start with the overall theme of Scorsese’s comments. He seems to think that if the comic book movie went away, without them sucking up all the oxygen, then films that Scorsese considers “cinema” will rush in to fill the vacuum. Then it will be 1969 again, and films like Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider have a chance of being in the Top Ten Highest grossing films of the year and he will have every project of his greenlit automatically with as big a budget as he wants, and everything will be perfect.

I have news for Mr. Scorsese. This will never happen. If comic book movies go away, another genre of big blockbuster will take its place, not the cinematic fare Scorsese loves. Why? Because, on the whole, most of the movie going audience doesn’t like “cinema.” They don’t care for it, and they don’t want to watch it.

How can I say that? Because there are films that Scorsese considers “cinema” being made every year. They are being shown in theaters around the country. And outside of a fringe group of aficionados like Scorsese, they don’t sell tickets. They don’t break box office records and they don’t fill studio coffers the way the comic book film does. That’s a simple fact.

Take Uncut Gems, the breakthrough film made by the Safdie brothers that Scorsese mentions. It stars Adam Sandler, one of the highest grossing actors in box office history. It got good buzz, especially around awards season. It made on $50 million. Granted, it only cost $19 million to make, but that $31 million profit wouldn’t even be enough to cover the year-end bonuses executives make at the major studios.

Yes, investing $200 million chasing an elusive $1 billion box office gross is misguided. But if that $200 million brings back even a $100 million profit, that would pay more of their employees’ salaries than a $31 million profit would.

I’m sure Scorsese thinks that if the major studios put the same amount of money marketing the cinematic fare as they do the comic book films, they would make up the difference in profits. After all, these comic book movies have nothing to give audiences! Scorsese says so himself!

I can’t believe that someone who is so intelligent about filmmaking can be so clueless about the state of the current movie industry. You can write part of it off as him being stuck in the past. When he broke into the film industry in the late 60s, it was undergoing a giant sea change. Audiences were growing tired of the technicolor musicals and westerns where the hero was always right and always won in the end. They wanted films that reflected the social and cultural upheaval that was going on in the outside world.

But that was two generations ago. Times change and people change. While you can argue that the world today is just as contentious as it was back when Scorsese made Mean Streets, audiences today are looking for escapism, not realism. That’s what comic book movies give audiences–the ability to spend three hours in an air-conditioned theater and forget all about the troubles in their lives over that time. Scorsese might not find the value in that, he thinks they should prefer spending the same amount of time in a theater watching people getting killed for their land rights by oil barons because it speaks more about the human condition. But a majority of moviegoers would prefer seeing Captain America smacking Thanos in the face with Thor’s hammer instead.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. My ideal movie world is ones where both films can coexist. That people who like weightier fare can go seek that out, and fans of popcorn movies can seek them out. But Scorsese thinks we should have a steady diet of heavier, issue driven fare. If people wanted to be that depressed, they’d just watch CNN or Fox News.