The one movie genre the Coen brothers will never touch: “Neither of us is drawn to that”
While it would be ridiculous to expect the Coen brothers to direct a conventional action blockbuster, a sequel to someone else’s movie, or a franchise film, it’s not as if they’ve pigeonholed themselves.
All of the siblings’ features are distinctly and unashamedly Coenesque, but they’ve unfolded through the parameters of multiple genres. Their debut, Blood Simple, was a backwoods neo noir, and they followed it up with the Looney Tunes-inspired antics of Raising Arizona, setting the stage for what was to come.
Whether it’s the jet-black comedy of Barton Fink, the screwball stylings of The Hudsucker Proxy, the neo-western trappings of No Country for Old Men, the classical western aesthetic of True Grit, the farcical Burn After Reading, or the ‘Odyssey meets Wizard of Oz‘ caper, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Joel and Ethan know how to bend established forms to their own idiosyncratic will.
Looking back, there was no chance they’d ever take the reins on Batman, but they were still offered. They even dipped their toes into superheroic waters when they assisted Sam Raimi in hammering Darkman into shape, which is ironic in itself when The Incredible Hulk was a property that gave them nightmares of selling out.
As much as audiences would pay good money to see it, some things simply aren’t in the Coens’ wheelhouse. Would people be interested in watching a Coens-directed Incredible Hulk movie? Of course they would, because it sounds ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it would be a good idea.
With that in mind, it’s a crying shame that they’ve got absolutely no interest whatsoever in sci-fi. What would a Coen brothers sci-fi movie look like? Who knows, but their names married to one of the most far-flung and fantastical genres is mouth-watering in itself. It could literally be anything, but since they’ve never been fans, it’s not going to happen.
“Neither of us is drawn to that kind of fiction,” Ethan Coen informed The Guardian. “There are movies that we both like. I don’t know that that would ever happen, and I don’t quite know why.” They enjoy it as viewers, and they appreciate when it’s done well, but for reasons they can’t quite explain, it’s never been on their filmmaking radars.
That said, Joel had a theory: “I don’t think we could get our minds around the whole spacesuit thing.” Of course, sci-fi doesn’t need to involve spacesuits, aliens, and distant planets to count as sci-fi, but the point still stands; the Coens aren’t enthusiastic about actively taking it on, so they’ve never contemplated it as a potential directorial vehicle.
It’s easy to understand why they couldn’t care less about diving deeper into genre territory than ever before, especially one they’re not invested in, because it could easily end in disaster. On the other hand, a shitty Coen brothers sci-fi movie that aimed for the stars and burst into flames well before impact would still be infinitely more enjoyable as a noble failure than Michael Bay’s Transformers films, and there are five of those fucking things.
