The undisputed king of streaming television, Taylor Sheridan, is back with another hot take (after revealing he “rage-baits” critics and dinged studio execs for being inept), and this time he shares a major creative criticism for the world of Marvel Comics movies (some would say superhero films are the modern equevliant to how Westerns were once seen back in the day). As he isn’t a big fan of how those movies tell rather than show via action or with the camera, instead of using dialogue to explore character moments, those scenes are often used as “information dumps” (the whole “show me, don’t tell me” creative mantra when it comes to moviemaking).
He shared his opinion recently on “The Bill Simmons Podcast” (via Entertainment Weekly), as Sheridan would explain his reasoning for the minor ire toward the Marvel franchises (“Captain America,” “The Avengers,” “Spider-Man” etc), coming from a screenwriter’s perspective and how action movies have changed over the decades.
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“What everyone else was doing was taking shortcuts,” Sheridan told Simmons. “Essentially, breaking all the very basic, fundamental rules of storytelling. Because they couldn’t figure out their story…With a movie, you’re supposed to show me what’s happening. The camera is supposed to move the story. The dialogue is supposed to tell me how the people in this world feel about what’s happening or what they hope to do or what they wish they hadn’t done or had done. So, if you stick to that one basic rule from the beginning, never have a character tell me something that the camera could show me…All these Marvel movies do it, ad nauseam. Where they will just have information dumps that you have to follow to get to the action rather than actually moving plot with action.”
Adding that the old school way of action filmmaking used to do it better, “It didn’t used to be this way when Steve McQueen was a movie star at Paramount, and Bobby Evans ran the studio because writers were turned loose. Directors were turned completely loose. There weren’t endless rewrites. There weren’t meetings with executives about tone and mood and all this nonsense.”
Sheridan, who was once a struggling bit actor before pivoting to becoming one of the hottest in-demand Hollywood screenwriters (ala “Sicario,” and “Hell or High Water“) before taking a crack at directing himself with “Wind River” and “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” eventually leading him to become the face of Paramount’s television division with a slew of television shows starring with the Neo-Western series Yellowstone as that landmark project helped boost their once struggling streaming service into a major player. His footprint in the world of modern television (now heading to NBCUniversal after Paramount decided against extending his contract) is sort of unmatched (even by Dick Wolf standards) with “Landman,” “Tulsa King,” “Special Ops: Lioness,” Mayor of Kingstown,” “The Madison,” “Lawmen: Bass Reeves,” “Frisco King,” and a slew of “Yellowstone” spinoffs (“Dutton Ranch,” “Marshals,” “1883,” and “1923“) under his belt.
Interestingly enough, Taylor Sheridan is getting into the studio IP universe himself as he was tasked to turn Activision‘s mega-popular first-person shooter military video game franchise “Call of Duty” (“Black Ops” and “Modern Warfare” storylines being the most easy to adapt for the big screen, in our humble opinion) into a franchise-starter at Paramount Skydance and has Peter Berg (despite slagging “COD” fans and the entire gaming culture in the past as “pathetic and weak”) attached to direct, after previously helming a bunch of the viral live-action ads. With his specific criticisms of the Marvel movie formula, there is certainly going to be some extreme scrutiny of how his “COD” movie turns out, and if Sheridan and Berg’s effort ends up mirroring those superhero gripes, he’s likely going to get hypocrisy claims (doubtful he’s even going to care if that’s the case).
Anywho, you can listen/watch the full exchange between Sheridan and Simmons’ podcast below.
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