If there’s one thing that Martin Scorsese has in common with the Marvel Cinematic Universe – not that he’d want to admit it – is that both parties make incredibly expensive movies.
The legendary director’s latest prestige drama Killers of the Flower Moon carries an eye-watering $200 million budget, roughly the same as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Before that, The Irishman cost around as much if not even more, even if it’s hard to tell where all of the financing has gone when you compare them in an apples-to-oranges kind of way.
Beyond that, he’s been up to his old tricks again after railing against comic book and franchise culture in a GQ profile, where he names Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Knight Rises director, as well as Man of Steel Writer and both Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League executive producer, Christopher Nolan as one of the people bucking the trend.
“The danger there is what it’s doing to our culture. Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those — that’s what movies are. 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. Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.”
Slight hint of irony aside, the fact is that Hollywood isn’t going to bend to the whims of Scorsese, not when the exact sort of blockbusters he hates are the ones that make the most at the box office. There’s a happy medium to be struck somewhere, it’s just a case of finding it.
