X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn thinks he knows what’s ailing Disney’s Marvel Studios: too much content and lousy CGI.
Fair enough, but he did avoid telling the truth no one in Hollywood dares to tell.
Regardless, Vaughn knows of what he speaks. He’s already successfully adapted three comic book properties into successful movies: Kingsman, Kick-Ass, and X-Men: First Class. But when he looks at the faltering superhero landscape today, he sees a lot of crap:
I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with the superhero [genre] 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… 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.
When you’re making a superhero movie, you sort of have to work harder because you’ve got to make people believe it. That’s why ‘X-Men: First Class’ was pretty grounded. We set it in the Cuban Missile Crisis; they had relatable human problems. And it wasn’t relying on the CG. I think CG’s fucked up everything as well, because you feel like you’re watching a video game. You’re not with the characters. Apart from ‘Guardians’… I still think Groot and the raccoon are fucking pieces of genius that I feel so much for them. So I’ll be intrigued. I think at least DC is under… I think James Gunn and Safran, they’ve got a good chance of popping, and hopefully [Kevin] Feige will go back to less is more and make less films and concentrate on making them great.
“I think there’s been so many bad superhero movies as well that it’s like the Western. You make so many, then you get bored of the genre, not because the genre is bad but because the films are bad,” he added.
Notice what he didn’t say: the dog Hollywood will never allow to bark… Of course, I’m talking about the obnoxious gender and sexual politics infecting what should be an escapist genre.
Woke is, by definition, death to creativity and nuance. Woke demands men kiss each other for no reason, that characters are defined by meaningless traits like their skin color and sexual fetishes, and everything be stridently and smugly declared rather than weaved through theme and character.
One of the great joys of movies is when we are left to ponder for ourselves what it all means. Here’s just one example: more than 50 years later, something I still love about The French Connection (1971) is that I have no idea what to think of Gene Hackman’s character, Popeye Doyle. Is he a bad cop, a great cop, a racist, a selfless hero…? Woke strips us of the joy of pondering. Woke does your thinking and judging for you, which is a lecture instead of art.
I would add that lousy visual effects do not automatically mean you are watching a lousy movie. I can think of countless movies with weak effects we all still love, going back 92 years to the original Dracula (1931).
What kills a movie is a lousy plot, dull characters, and political rhetoric. Emasculating Thor into a dope in an apron is what ruined Thor: Love and Thunder, not the visual effects.
Next up for the Disney Grooming Syndicate is The Marvels, which cost around $300 million to produce and promote. As of now, it’s tracking for a pathetic $50 to $75 million opening on November 10.
Watching woke movies bomb is a helluva lot more entertaining than anything Hollywood’s produced in years. I watch old movies on Blu-ray and watch new movies bomb in theaters. I am a man in full.
John Nolte’s debut novel Borrowed Time (Bombardier Books) is available today. You can read an exclusive excerpt here and a review of the novel here.