The “pornographic” reason Stephen King hates superhero movies: “Man, that’s wrong”
The sky is blue, water is wet, and a veteran creative with deep ties to Hollywood doesn’t like something about superhero movies, with Stephen King the latest to add his name to the ever-growing list of those who’ve cast a judgmental eye over comic book adaptations.
To be honest, it’s one of the industry’s most pointless debates. Sure, the old guard has their issues with studio executives being continually obsessed with spandex-clad crimefighters saving the world from imminent destruction, but they make billions of dollars every year at the box office, so it won’t change.
Even now, when there’s a genuine sense of superhero fatigue creeping in, 2025’s assorted entries have earned almost $2 billion in ticket sales, and there’s something hilarious ironic about Paul Thomas Anderson, the auteur’s auteur, being one of Marvel’s biggest defenders in the face of constant scorn.
Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott are just some of the elder statesmen who’ve railed against the constant deluge of identikit adventures, and while he’s not a filmmaker by trade, King’s half-century assocation with motion pictures has given him plenty of insight into the inner workings of Tinseltown’s ever-evolving trends, fads, and crazes.
His complaint is a strange one, though, since he levelled an X-rated accusation at a genre that’s about as sexless as mainstream cinema gets, pointing to how superhero blockbusters have a tendency to cause carnage and collateral damage on a global scale without ever showing the true cost of violence.
“If you look at these superhero movies, you’ll see some supervillain who’s destroying whole city blocks, but you never see any blood,” he ruminated to The Times. “And man, that’s wrong. It’s almost, like, pornographic.” Comparing a style of cinema that’s almost uniformly PG-rated is odd, but King was reflecting on how he instructed the filmmakers not to tone down The Long Walk in any way.
“I said, if you’re not going to show it, don’t bother,” he offered. “And so they made a pretty brutal movie.” Not many superhero movies can be accused of being brutal, and even the rare R-rated efforts, like Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool trilogy and Joaquin Phoenix’s two Joker flicks, aren’t overflowing with blood, guts, severed limbs, and disembowelled bodies.
It took Marvel Studios until its 26th film, Chloé Zhao’s Eternals, to even get around to its first sex scene, and it was about as titillating as watching paint dry, which underlines the oxymoronic nature of King lambasting a world full of rubble-strewn metropolises, giant sky beams, and monologuing villains who want everyone to know that we’re not so different, you and I, as borderline “pornographic.”
Needless to say, in a world where Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man are being rebooted with reckless abandon, audiences won’t mistake any of their superpowered shenanigans for smut. King disagrees and thinks that because the genre incorporates so many violent acts without depicting them as particularly violent acts, it’s got more in common with porno than most people realise, although he might be in the minority.
