Various directors have voiced their concerns about the state of modern studio films in recent years. And that means it’s unavoidable that they’ll eventually comment on the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Folks such as Ridley Scott, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderberg, Roland Emmerich, and Denis Villeneuve have made their opinions/gripes known about the superhero genre and how they dominate the culture.
The iconic Francis Ford Coppola recently spoke with GQ Magazine, and when the topic switched to modern studio movies and the filmmaker took issues with how Marvel movies and other big projects are “prototypes,” then subsequent installments are repackaged to look different but essentially are the same movie made “over and over.”
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“There used to be studio films,” he told GQ. “Now there are Marvel pictures. And what is a Marvel picture? A Marvel picture is one prototype movie that is made over and over and over and over and over again to look different.”
The director also took “Dune” and “No Time To Die” to task, “Even the talented people—you could take ‘Dune,’ made by Denis Villeneuve, an extremely talented, gifted artist, and you could take ‘No Time to Die,’ directed by…Gary? Cary Fukunaga—extremely gifted, talented, beautiful artists, and you could take both those movies, and you and I could go and pull the same sequence out of both of them and put them together. The same sequence where the cars all crash into each other. They all have that stuff in it, and they almost have to have it, if they’re going to justify their budget. And that’s the good films and the talented filmmakers.”
“If I just had made a career of 15 mafioso movies, I would be very rich, but I wouldn’t know as much as I do now. Now I’m still rich, but I learned more,” Coppola said, reflecting on his own career-making studio gangster flicks.
Coppola famously had to fight the studio to get movies like “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” made the way he envisioned alongside the troubled productions behind the scenes. There is undoubtedly more nuance to what he’s saying here than simply saying they’re not for him. He is currently trying to mount his long-in-the-works opus “Megalopolis,” and it just looks like it may happen.