‘Maybe we need a bit of time off’: A filmmaker that’s directed, written, or produced 9 comic book movies weighs in on superhero cinema

He may have walked away from three times as many Marvel movies as he actually ended up directing, but Matthew Vaughn‘s filmography is nonetheless dripping with comic book adaptations.

As well as helming Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class, and the entirety of the Kingsman franchise so far, he also served as a producer or executive producer on Kick-Ass 2 and Days of Future Past, as well as Josh Trank’s infamous Fantastic Four and Vin Diesel’s forgotten flop Bloodshot for one reason or another.

Even though there’s a degree of irony in Vaughn espousing that maybe superhero cinema needs to slow down and step back when he’s actively developing another Kingsman blockbuster in the wake of the last one scoring the saga’s worst reviews and weakest box office, you can’t say that he didn’t make a couple of salient points in an interview with ScreenRant.

“I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with the superhero in the sense that, I do think, maybe we all need a little bit of time off from it. Maybe someone will make something so great that we will get excited again and remind everybody that just having identical ways of making superheroes… Superhero films are films. It’s a film that has superheroes in it. I think what happened was that they became superheroes, and the film part wasn’t that important.”

The bubble has yet to burst even after 20+ years of dominance, but the recent struggles faced by both Marvel and DC has indicated that it might be closer than ever to finally popping, with a focus on quantity over quality a lot easier to say out loud than implement given Hollywood’s insatiable desire to continue mining its most bankable genre for all that it’s worth.