Martin Scorsese has directed some of the best movies ever made and most of them convey some powerful message with skill and depth. So it's odd that when he complains about "comic book movies" and says they're a danger to the whole concept of cinema, I have no idea what the f-word he's saying. That is unless he's saying that everyone should be making Martin Scorsese movies and I don't think it's that.
I also can't believe he thinks that any force in the world can stop the film studios — including the ones that fund and distribute Martin Scorsese movies — from making whatever the public is paying to see. At the moment, that list includes what he calls "comic book movies" and so it will be until enough of them lose money that the studios turn to something else.
He also seems unaware that the studios are making plenty of films that in no way fit any definition of "comic book movies." Plenty of them were up for Oscars last year. Plenty will be up next year. Here's a list of some of them for this year…
Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things, Barbie, American Fiction, The Holdovers, Past Lives, The Zone of Interest, Origin, Maestro, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Color Purple, Ferrari, Anatomy of a Fall, May December, The Bikeriders, The Iron Claw, Air, Saltburn, Dumb Money, Rustin, All of Us Strangers, Freud's Last Session, Napoleon, The Burial, American Symphony, Fair Play, BlackBerry, Priscilla, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, Wish, The Taste of Things, Nyad, The Boys in the Boat, Fingernails, She Came to Me, Asteroid City, A Little Prayer, The Teachers Lounge and The Royal Hotel.
There are a couple of things in there you might call "comic book movies" but not many. Then I think back to past years when it seems like half of what the movie studios were making were imitations of Porky's, Smokey and the Bandit and Halloween. Did all those movies warp an entire generation's mind of what a movie could or should be?
Mr. Scorsese is acting like "comic book movies" are some new thing. Just to take a some-time-ago decade at random, the highest grossing movie of 1980 was Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back. The highest-grossing movie of 1981 was Superman II. The highest of 1982 was E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and the highest-grossing movies of the following years were Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Batman.
I dunno about you but I'd call most of those "comic book movies." And now here we have Scorsese saying of the current flock, "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." Me, I think we've always had a movie industry that put forth a significant number of movies about which one could sound that alarm. I don't get why that's a problem now.