Although he’s presently tied up with the DC Extended Universe movie The Suicide Squad and its HBO Max spinoff series Peacemaker, director James Gunn will soon be venturing back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe to round out his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy with Vol. 3. But before he does so, he’s taken the opportunity to address the comments that Martin Scorsese made back in 2019, where he dismissed Marvel movies as “not cinema” whilst out promoting The Irishman.
“It just seems awfully cynical that he kept coming out against Marvel, and that’s the only thing that would get him press for his movie, so then he just kept coming out against Marvel so that he could get press for his movie,” said Gunn when asked about Scorsese’s comments during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “So he’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something that he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it.”
Despite his criticism, Gunn stopped short of slamming Scorsese and did sympathise with some of the iconic filmmaker’s criticisms, adding that:
“He’s one of the greatest filmmakers who’s ever existed. I love his movies. I can watch his movies with no problem. And he said a lot of things that I agree with. There is a lot of things that are true about what he said. There are a lot of heartless, soulless spectacle films out there that don’t reflect what should be happening. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve talked to filmmakers before they went and made a big movie and said, ‘Hey we’re in this together. Let’s do something different with these big movies. Let’s make them something different that’s come before them. And then see them go and just cater to every single studio whim or what’s thought of [by executives] and just be grossed out, frankly.”
What do you make of this situation? Did Martin Scorsese really need Marvel to get headlines, or is Gunn mistaken? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
