Awhile ago director Martin Scorsese ran into some controversy when he said that he considered Marvel superhero movies to be more like theme park rides than actual pieces of cinematic art. After Scorsese made this statement many Marvel fans became upset with the director’s comments and expressed their anger online. However it turns out there are those who also might agree with Scorsese’s opinion, including Francis Ford Coppola.
Coppola is, of course best known for directing The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now. He’s also the father of director Sofia Coppola and the uncle of America’s national overacting treasure Nicolas Cage. Not only did Coppola agree with Scorsese, but he referred to the Marvel movies as “despicable” and critiqued them for all featuring similar plots. Coppola is quoted as saying, “When Martin Scorsese says that the Marvel pictures are not cinema, he’s right because we expect to learn something from cinema, we expect to gain something, some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration…I don’t know that anyone gets anything out of seeing the same movie over and over again.”
After Coppola made these statement, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn responded on Instagram with post defending superhero movies. Gunn claims that superhero movies are a genre just like westerns and gangster movies, as they too were once dismissed by an older generation of moviegoers. And it was ironically directors like Coppola and Scorsese who breathed new life into the gangster genre as prestige cinema. Gunn’s post mentions that not everyone will be able to appreciate superhero movies, but not everyone needs to.
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