Martin Scorsese Is Missing That Marvel Movies Are All About Character

The seemingly never-ending back and forth between director Martin Scorsese and fans of Marvel movies continued Monday in a New York Times Op-ed piece written by Scorsese himself. In it, he made many good points in a thoughtful, coherent manner, while at the same time seemingly using the terms “Marvel movies” and “franchise films” interchangeably. The problem? The Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) isn’t your typical film franchise. By using “Marvel movies” as a generic term, Scorsese is vastly understating the complex, intricate, and yes, cinematic, character-driven story that the MCU has told over the past decade.

By his own admission, Scorsese didn’t watch most of the movies that make up the Infinity Saga. (In his defense, there ARE 23 such films, which is a lot for a man who has directed 11 films of his own since Iron Man was released in 2008 to watch.) I really think that maybe he should have checked a few out, at least before he published a piece in the New York Times. Perhaps Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Or Thor: Ragnorak? I honestly think he might enjoy them!

For those of you who haven’t been privy to this Twitter debate that has now dragged on for a literal month—practically a decade in Twitter years—Scorsese, when asked about Marvel, told Empire magazine in October that Marvel movies “aren’t cinema.” Those words ignited an impassioned and exhausting Film Twitter debate about Marvel, franchises, and art, culminating today in the director himself penning the Times Op-Ed titled “I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.” I won’t lie, I expected, based on that title, that Scorsese would clarify he wasn’t blaming Marvel movies, specifically, for what he sees as a crisis of franchise film domination. But after reading Scorsese’s piece, I have to say… he kind of is! As a result, he’s undermining his own argument.

“I grew up when I did and I developed a sense of movies — of what they were and what they could be — that was as far from the Marvel universe as we on Earth are from Alpha Centauri,” Scorsese writes in his piece. “It was about characters — the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.”

Then, later, he writes: “Many of the elements that define cinema as I know it are there in Marvel pictures. What’s not there is revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger. Nothing is at risk. The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes.”

OK, fine: Scorsese does not like Marvel movies and, as he said himself, hasn’t seen very many of them. That’s his right. I’m under no delusions that Marvel movies are going away anytime soon, nor am I generally in the habit of rushing to defend our multi-millionaire corporate Disney overlords. But…saying that Marvel movies aren’t about characters is objectively incorrect. The entire crux of those 23 interconnected movies—and the reason they are so wildly popular—are the characters. We first met Tony Stark as a selfish asshole with Iron Man in 2008, got to know him over the course of a decade, and became so invested in that by the time Avengers: Endgame premiered, sold-out theaters were collectively sobbing over his death on opening day. (Sorry for the spoiler, Marty!) You don’t inspire emotions like that—not to mention millions of memes, pieces of fan art, Halloween costumes, YouTube reaction videos, and Slack channels—without really good characters.

It’s a complicated, messy way of telling a character-driven story, of course. The T’Challa we met in Black Panther, a character who would do anything to protect his homeland of Wakanda, seems a little different than the T’Challa in Infinity War, who offered up his people to protect a weird, dapper robot. Ragnorak director Taika Waititi gave us a very different Thor than Dark World director Alan Taylor. Though the characters originally came from the mind of Stan Lee and others, as movies they are not the product of a singular auteur vision. (Scorsese thinks that’s an inherently bad thing—because “the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all”—and while I disagree, that’s an argument for another time). Maybe it was the wrong way, sometimes. Scorsese’s point about “the sameness of today’s franchise picture” rings true. I personally would have been fine to lose some of those extraneous Iron Man and Avengers sequels for that reason—but for the most part, the approach of the MCU when taken as a whole was, and is, undeniably unique.

I can’t help but feel the reason Scorsese fails to acknowledge this in his otherwise nuanced and thoughtful piece is because he hasn’t watched the movies. He simply just doesn’t know! I realize I sound like an intrepid blowhard claiming that Oscar-winning, universally-acclaimed director Martin Scorsese doesn’t know something about movies, but… that’s the way it comes off.

Unless Scorsese amends that approach, I think angry Marvel fans will continue to stubbornly plug their ears to the very valid point he actually trying to make, which is this: There is a crisis in the film industry right now. Films that are weird, risky, uncomfortable, or otherwise capital-A “Artistic” not only make less money than franchise blockbusters, they make almost no money at all. No money means no greenlights from major studios for further projects, which has resulted in risky titles all but disappearing from theaters. That’s particularly distressing for those who don’t live in a major city with access to independent film. It’s a great point that needs to be made, clearly, and I’m glad Scorsese is making it. I just wish he wasn’t making it by placing the blame on Marvel movies. At the very least, I wish he would watch them before doing so.

Earlier this fall, I was assigned to review The Irishman, Scorsese’s new three-and-a-half hour mob epic. In the weeks leading up to the world premiere, I spent a significant amount of my free time watching Scorsese’s mobster movies; rewatching ones I’d seen a long time ago as well as watching ones I hadn’t seen for the first time. I did that because, well, it’s my job. But also I did it because—even though mobster movies have never been my cup of tea—there’s nothing worse than someone publishing an opinion about a movie, franchise, or genre they haven’t actually watched. If Scorsese would like to do the same before his next op-ed, I suggest he start with Iron Man. It will be on Disney+ next week, and he might find the movie’s sense of character much deeper than he would expect.

Where to stream Iron Man