Matthew Vaughn criticises superhero movies: “I think CGI’s fucked up everything”
The English writer and director Matthew Vaughn of X-Men: First Class has slammed recent superhero filmmaking, stating that CGI has ruined the once-celebrated genre of cinema.
Vaughn, who helmed the Kingsman franchise as well as the beloved 2010 superhero flick Kick-Ass, compared superhero movies to the western genre. “I think there’s been so many bad superhero movies as well that it’s like when the western got,” he stated, “You make so many that you get bored of the genre, not because the genre is bad, but because the films are bad”.
Continuing, he added to Screen Rant: “I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with the superhero 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 and remind everybody that just having identical ways of making superheroes… 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”.
Pinpointing precisely what’s gone wrong with so many recent releases, such as Andrés Muschietti’s Flash and Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Vaughn remarks: “I think CG’s f–ked up everything as well, because you feel like you’re watching a video game. You’re not with the characters”.
Vaughn’s own superhero movies, X-Men: First Class and Kick-Ass, used CGI sparingly and were rooted in some sort of relatable human tale.
As the director points out regarding his own projects, “You’ve got to put humanity in everything. I always say, the crazier it is, the more human it has to be”.
Last month, the first trailer arrived for Vaughn’s new film Argylle. The teaser sees Henry Cavill take on a mysterious spy role alongside the likes of John Cena, Dua Lipa and Samuel L. Jackson. The movie is set for a cinematic release on February 2nd 2024 before moving to Apple TV+.
The synopsis for Argylle reads: “Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World franchise) is Elly Conway, the reclusive author of a series of best-selling espionage novels, whose idea of bliss is a night at home with her computer and her cat, Alfie. But when the plots of Elly’s fictional books—which center on secret agent Argylle and his mission to unravel a global spy syndicate—begin to mirror the covert actions of a real-life spy organization, quiet evenings at home become a thing of the past.”
Take a look at the trailer for Argylle below.
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