Back in October 2019, Martin Scorsese made headlines by claiming that the MCU was “not cinema”, and that Marvel films were like “theme parks”. Now, this response reeks of gate-keeping and genre snobbery, but I do have to, in part, agree with Scorsese on this front. It’s not that the MCU ‘isn’t cinema’. I saw Avengers: Endgame (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2019) in theatres three times: I can attest to its existence as cinema. It is that the MCU is no longer cinema as we once knew it.
Cinema as a medium for artistic expression has always been one of innovation. From the first Lumière picture to the insane machismo of action films like Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991), to Ridley Scott’s much maligned Prometheus (2012) each has brought something new or innovating to the field. Marvel films just…don’t.
Watching costumed heroes fly through the air and perform superhuman feats is wonderful to watch, even if only as pure escapism. Indeed, it’s what drew many people to the original comics in the first place, but nowadays it holds much less appeal. Audiences were wowed when Christopher Reeves first took to the skies as Superman, but barely batted an eye when Henry Cavill took a turn in Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013). And, while these are DC properties, I think that – quality of Man of Steel aside – the root of the problem lies at the MCU’s feet.
With the massive critical success of Iron Man (Jon Favreau, 2008), and Disney’s acquisition of Marvel Studios following soon after, Marvel films finally got the kick-start they needed to rescue them from a long history of less-than stellar cinematic adaptations. Thus began a cinematic homogenization unlike any ever seen before. With each successive year we got more and more films in the MCU, all financed by the limitless bank account of Disney. These films all follow the same story beats, and share the same reliance on an overabundance of quips in keeping with Disney’s family friendly tone, and usually not-that-polished CGI, (with the exception of Thanos in Infinity War (Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, 2018). This would be fine if there were only one of these films a year – we could simply ignore it and go see something else in the theatres.
But no.
The number of MCU films was increased to two a year, and then three. In the twelve years since 2008, there have been 23 films within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and, as the statistic that went viral on Twitter recently pointed out, 2020 – the year of a global pandemic shutdown – is the first year since 2009 that there hasn’t been a Marvel film in cinemas.
They’re everywhere; Disney’s blank cheques allow for near unlimited marketing campaigns. Big posters, trailers with perhaps two or three new seconds of footage which get dissected and discussed ad nauseam in the media. This all leads to films garnering over a billion dollars each, feeding back into Disney in a vicious cycle you cannot escape. Even if you don’t engage with film as a concept, you’re at least tangentially aware of the cultural behemoth that is the MCU.
Not only that, but the MCU has altered the very structure of films. In much the same way as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (David Yates, 2010-2011) showed studio executives that splitting the final installment of a series into two parts was a financially viable alternative to making just the one film, the MCU demonstrated the viability of the shared cinematic universe as a model for a film series. In the modern era of cinema, the idea that everything could be connected, that a bunch of disparate stories could be told and then drawn together into a triumphant concluding film – exemplified by the MCU’s ‘phases’ – was something fresh and exciting, even if not a new idea. Seeing this successful model begin to bloom, studios did what studios always do: they raced to make their own version of whatever’s popular in a bid to cash in on the trend before it became unpopular again.
This mad rush to copy what Marvel got right is ruining films, because studios are rushing into it without any of the planning that Marvel originally had. Instead of something which ties a universe together, we get a rushed muddle of an attempt to mimic the formula like Justice League (Zack Snyder, 2017), or something like Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman, 2017), which spent far too much time trying to set up multiple future films like it was The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) instead of just focusing on making a good film in and of itself. This is doubly hilarious, as the Universal Monsters, of which The Mummy was already the beginning of a reboot, was one of the first franchises ever to pull off a shared cinematic universe well.
Hell, even Scoob! (Tony Cervone, 2020) from this year tried to emulate The Avengers, to less than universal praise.
It’s not that what Marvel is doing is bad, per se, but it is undoubtedly damaging the landscape of cinema, and the way that films are made.
I don’t want to sound negative or overly critical – we hardly need more of it in times like these – but I feel it needs to be said. I’m not a cinematic purist by any means. I’m not here to tell you what ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ cinema. There’s not a lot we as individuals can do in the face of multi-billion dollar companies like Disney, but we can all try and put our money where our mouth is and support other films, such as the indie films Searchlight Pictures put out, or increase viewership to foreign cinema. All I know is that superhero films are the largest demographic of films currently being made and it’s rapidly reaching critical mass. If the genre doesn’t diversify or slow down somewhat, it’s going to die a bigger death than the Western ever did, probably taking much of the industry infrastructure with it too.
And what will remain then?
