Marvel Studios: the place promising careers go to die
Marvel has been an endless source of debate over the years, with pointed criticism leveraged against them about the validity of these stories as an art form, a conversation that exploded after Martin Scorsese shared his thoughts on their part in the downfall of cinema as a whole. The director likened the films produced by the conglomerate studio to ‘amusement park films’, asserting that they cannot be considered true art because of how they are made and marketed. The superhero films are often extremely formulaic and seem to operate most keenly as a blatant money-making scheme, relying on digital technology to craft the worlds in these movies and hollow action sequences that exist in the absence of substantial writing.
The Marvel movies perfectly encapsulate what happens when you merge capitalism with art. The studio pumps out multiple projects that are all variations on the same theme and story, designed to appease mass audiences with no risk or true vulnerability being injected into the medium. This leads to a brain-numbing product that only kills our ability to recognise and enjoy genuine creativity.
However, in an attempt to redeem themselves and become recognised as a genuine art form, the monstrous studio then began hiring arthouse and independent directors to rescue their image and put a plaster over their reputation. They continued making the same types of stories, but now, there is just a new face to be the ultimate shiny decoy for the trash hidden beneath the surface. Nothing has really changed, except now Chloé Zhao is being used to push the idea that they are a progressive and cutting-edge studio that cares about bold storytelling and using their power to amplify diverse and exciting voices.
While this sounds somewhat productive in theory, in practice, it has had the opposite effect, as it now appears as though the studio only does this for the projects they don’t really care about, existing as a hollow and empty gesture towards progression that benefits their image but actively harms the career of the independent filmmaker that they use as a pawn. Chloé Zhao became the scapegoat for a terrible film, with Eternals being met poorly by both critics and fans of the studio. Now, it is not seen as Marvel’s fault for producing a shitty script, but audiences will blame the unknown director for helming a bad film.
Marvel can use the image of exciting new filmmakers to manipulate the public into thinking that they care about creativity and daring storytelling, but when these filmmakers try to propose genuinely daring ways of reinventing these stories, they are often shut down and met with resistance. Ultimately, what matters the most is making a profit, and the talent and voice of the director are just a vessel for their corporate ideas, hiding behind their image to make them look better in the eyes of critics and directors like Scorsese.
While the studio offers creative freedom and the promise of a huge new opportunity for independent directors, every single filmmaker that has worked for them has subsequently experienced a huge decline in their career, with the impact of directing a less-than-popular film for the studio being a hard blow to recover from, with people remembering them not for their earlier work that was hugely successful among smaller audiences, but for the studio film that flopped through no fault of their own, seen by huge audiences.
Marvel abuses the voices of emerging filmmakers by squeezing them into a corporate machine and using them to benefit their public image, exploiting their creative identity with no care about the impact that this has on their careers. Revolutionary filmmakers like Barry Jenkins, Chloé Zhao and Destin Daniel Cretton have all been manipulated into the machine, and Marvel has continued to be a parasitic force in the film industry that leeches off of their talent under the guise of changing the studio, all while knowing that this will never actually happen.
