Martin Scorsese has made no secret of his feelings about comic book and franchise culture in the past, and he’s speaking out again in a new profile with GQ.
Speaking broadly about the impact of big movie franchises, Scorsese said “the danger is what it’s doing to our culture.”
“There are going to be generations now that think movies are only those – that's what movies are,” he said, with the interviewer continuing that they may already believe that.
“They already think that,” he agreed. “Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up.”
“Let’s see what you got,” he continued. “Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
And while many were quick to call out Scorsese for naming Nolan, who directed The Dark Knight trilogy, we’re willing to bet he was probably talking about Nolan flicks like his most recent, the hit biopic Oppenheimer.
The filmmaker, who’s on the press cycle for his upcoming film Killers of the Flower Moon (read our review here), went on to reveal that Warner Bros. wanted one of the two leads of his 2006 Oscar winner The Departed, Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, to live. In Scorsese’s eyes, that wasn’t a creative call, but one the studio wanted to make to milk the movie for sequels.
“What they wanted was a franchise,” he said. “It wasn’t about a moral issue of a person living or dying.”
He also talked about how content is defined in the streaming era, even as his Killers of the Flower Moon is being co-distributed by Apple TV+. He referred to some of it as “manufactured content,” saying it “isn’t really cinema.”
“It’s almost like AI making a film,” he said. “And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films, what will it give you? Aside from a kind of consummation of something and then eliminating it from your mind, your whole body, you know? So what is it giving you?”
Scorsese has, of course, come out against blockbusters before, igniting quite the debate when he said Marvel movies are “not cinema,” which the likes of Kevin Feige and James Gunn pushed back against.
Killers of the Flower Moon will hit theaters on Oct. 20, and will be released on Apple TV+ at an unspecified date following its theatrical run.
Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she's not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.
