Count Stephen Dorff among the Hollywood insiders who aren’t happy with superhero’s domination of the movie business in recent years.
In an interview that began making waves on Monday, the “True Detective” actor told the U.K. Independent he believes his industry is turning into “one big game show.” “You have actors that don’t have a clue what they’re doing. You have filmmakers that don’t have a clue what they’re doing,” Dorff said. “We’re all in these little boxes on these streamers. TV, film – it’s all one big clusterf**k of content now.”
The one-time star of the Marvel-based franchise, “Blade,” took particular aim at comic book films, saying he would never want to do a film like upcoming release “Black Widow.”
“I still hunt out the good s**t because I don’t want to be in Black Widow,” he told the outlet. “It looks like garbage to me. It looks like a bad video game. I’m embarrassed for those people. I’m embarrassed for Scarlett [Johansson]! I’m sure she got paid five, seven million bucks, but I’m embarrassed for her. I don’t want to be in those movies. I really don’t. I’ll find that kid director that’s gonna be the next Kubrick and I’ll act for him instead.”
Marvel fans on Twitter immediately mocked the 47-year-old, but Dorff is hardly alone among his peers.
As the Daily Wire previously reported, legendary director Martin Scorsese has said much the same thing of comic book movies. Describing them as “not cinema,” he said in 2019, “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”
Scorsese’s friend Francis Ford Coppola defended this assessment, 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.” The director of the Godfather series took the criticism one step further, arguing, “Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”
More recently, actress Emily Blunt has said while there was a time she would have been thrilled to play a superhero in a Marvel movie, her feelings have changed. “I don’t know if superhero movies are for me. They’re not up my alley. I don’t like them. I really don’t,” she told Howard Stern in May. “It’s been exhausted,” she said of the genre overall. “We are inundated—it’s not only all the movies, it’s the endless TV shows as well. It’s not to say that I’d never want to play one, it would just have to be something so cool and like a really cool character, and then I’d be interested.”