Director Alejandro González Iñárritu calls superheroes “sad figures”
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu has expressed a further distaste of the popular comic book adaptation genre at the BAFTA Tea Party, calling the superhero figures they present “sad figures”.
“I see heroes every day. I see beautiful people really going through very difficult situations and doing incredible things,” the filmmaker said. “And that is the people that I kind of connect with. But these kinds of superpower heroes, really do we need that?”
He added: “If you need that, is there something missing … instead of admiring what we have, the possibilities that we have?”
Iñárritu first shared his dislike of superhero movies in 2014, telling Deadline that the genre is a “cultural genocide”. Detailing further, the director continued: “The problem is that sometimes they purport to be profound, based on some Greek mythological kind of thing. And they are honestly very right wing,” the 21 Grams director told the outlet. “I always see them as killing people because they do not believe in what you believe, or they are not being who you want them to be.”
“The audience is so overexposed to plot and explosions and shit that doesn’t mean nothing about the experience of being human,” he continued.
Acclaimed American filmmaker Martin Scorsese triggered a significant discussion on the debate of superhero movies’ status in contemporary cinema in 2019 when he said, “Marvel movies weren’t cinema”. This statement derived responses from MCU stars such as Tom Holland, who said: “But the way I break down the character, the way the director etches out the arc of the story and characters – it’s all the same, just done on a different scale. So I do think they’re real art.”
Director Quentin Tarantino, known for his stylised features that celebrate pop culture, shared similar views to Iñárritu and Scorsese in his recent book, Cinematic Speculation. The filmmaker called this era of Hollywood, which is comprised mainly of Marvel blockbusters, as “the worst”.
Tarantino added: “You have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters. But they’re not movie stars… Captain America is the star. Or Thor is the star.”
Actor Simu Liu responded on Twitter last year, stating: “If the only gatekeepers to movie stardom came from Tarantino and Scorsese, I would never have had the opportunity to lead a $400 million plus movie.”
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