Photo by Stephane Cardinale – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images(LYON, FRANCE) — Not only does Francis Ford Coppola support his fellow film-making legend Martin Scorsese’s opinion that superhero movies “aren’t cinema,” he’s now gone even further, calling them “despicable.”
According to The Guardian, the Godfather series director declared, “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,” said the 80-year-old filmmaker to journalists after receiving Lyon’s Prix Lumiere award for his contribution to cinema.
“Martin was kind when he said it’s not cinema. He didn’t say it’s despicable, which I just say it is.”
Coppola’s next film is his long-in-development opus Megalopolis, which he described as is his “most ambitious” ever.
As he did when Scorsese made his Marvel movie fan-riling comments, Guardians of the Galaxy series director James Gunn took to Instagram to rebut Coppola.
“Many of our grandfathers thought all gangster movies were the same, often calling them ‘despicable,’ Gunn wrote.
“Some of our great-grandfathers thought the same of westerns, and believed the films of John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and Sergio Leone were all exactly the same,” he continued. “I remember a great uncle to whom I was raving about Star Wars. He responded by saying, ‘I saw that when it was called 2001, and, boy, was it boring!'”
Gunn added, “Superheroes are simply today’s gangsters/cowboys/outer space adventurers. Some superhero films are awful, some are beautiful. Like westerns and gangster movies…not everyone will be able to appreciate them, even some geniuses. And that’s okay.”
Marvel Studios is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.
Copyright © 2019, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.