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Comment by jbigelow76 | Hacker News Reader

Not everything needs to be a deep exploration of our intellectual and emotional destitution, not for everyone.

I think Moore's criticism and your push-back kind of dovetail into Martin Scorsese's critique[1][2] that comic book movies aren't cinema. It would be fine for comic book movies to be the escapist entertainment they are if they weren't the overwhelming majority of type of movie that is getting made these days.

I wonder if Moore would be as critical if instead of there being 20+ Marvel Character Universe movies in the span of 10 years there had only be say 4 or 5?

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/martin-scorsese-m...

[2] The article lightly touches on Scorsese's critique but doesn't go into depth, probably because Moore is critiquing the "matter" and Scorsese is critiquing the "medium", but they intertwine heavily.

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> I wonder if Moore would be as critical if instead of there being 20+ Marvel Character Universe movies in the span of 10 years there had only be say 4 or 5?

Would it even be a topic of discussion? Lots of bad movies get made. The question is why is this drek the dominating force in American movies now?

Would it even be a topic of discussion?

That's my point, it probably wouldn't be.

Lots of bad movies get made. The question is why is this drek the dominating force in American movies now?

The movie that kicked off the MCU train was the original Iron Man in 2008. It was actually GOOD and was still somewhat novel; and it made a shit-ton of money. That's why the all the follow ups happened, Disney's corporate lack of imagination and the audience's uninterest in holding them accountable for it, which is where Moore's and Scorsese's critiques of the audiences intersect.

This misses the point of Marvel movies, though. There is an entire universe of characters and stories. Iron Man's success paved the way for putting those stories on the big screen. Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, Dr. Strange, the Infinity Saga, and so on. That's what Keven Feige, and many of the Marvel people have been trying to do. Setup a universe to tell these stories instead of just having one-off superhero movies.

So instead of Spider-Man or Iron Man just being in their own movies, they can fight alongside (or even against) Captain America, Thanos, etc.

So it's not necessarily that there were 20+ MCU movies in the span of 10 years (and from what I understand the majority were at least good and some great), it's that during that time period the MCU movies became a dominant slice of the overall movie pie instead of the entire pie growing bigger. That, overall, seems to be Scorsese's gripe, because Avengers Endgame and DC's Justice League and Joker, etc... suck up so much oxygen Scorsese couldn't find a studio to back The Irishman so now he had go with Netflix. Now I'm starting to diverge a lot from where Scorsese and Moore intersect and it becomes more about Scorsese and a matter of sour grapes.

Yeah, I can understand being concerned about the genre taking up too much of the pie, preventing other kinds of movies from getting funding. But also a little bit of sour grapes.

But the pie has also only stayed the same size (or possibly shrunk) from the perspective of people-chair-hours in big chain theaters. Scorsese himself is an example that a lot of the same filmmaking is still happening, it's just moved to Netflix and other streaming services (and "prestige Cable", which is a branch of streaming services).

It's interesting the forces trying to fight that "real cinema" means people-chair-hours in building labeled a theater, and the obvious fact that the more serious/prestige/independent cinema is increasingly moving directly into people's homes. Netflix versus Cannes, for instance, has just been a fascinating thing to watch, because you've got economic forces versus traditional nostalgia for a cinema that only briefly ever existed as people-chair-hours, and has always been fighting economically for theater time versus whatever "lowest common denominator" fads were current (look at complaints over the decades aimed at Universal's early monster movies, the many decades of cheap musical spectacles, the eras of cheap westerns, etc and so forth).

If you need big events to push people out the comfort of their home theaters and streaming services, of course it is going to be some "lowest common denominator" fad.

(Also, mafia/gangster films were another one of those cheap film fads, and Scorsese and others "elevated it", but that was once considered a genre like we consider superhero films today that maybe didn't qualify as true "cinema". What debate that is old is new again.)

> For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

I don't know, it seems like Scorsese's critique is for people who might possibly get some sort of actual budget from a production company to make something, because his statements can't possibly apply to someone genuinely just starting out. Having an outlet such as YouTube where you can gain worldwide distribution for your zero-budge work seems pretty amazing compared to options during the period he compares things to.

> I wonder if Moore would be as critical if instead of there being 20+ Marvel Character Universe movies in the span of 10 years there had only be say 4 or 5?

Almost certainly, he did write the Watchmen after all.

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