The movie genre Jodie Foster wants to disappear forever: “Hopefully people will be sick of it soon”
We can’t all enjoy the same things; life would be one big monochromatic tapestry if that were the case.
If you’re anything like me, for instance, you like the chocolatey bits right at the bottom of Cornettos, you can’t stand Dermot O’Leary, and you believe ‘Moonlight Mile’ by The Rolling Stones is the greatest song of all time. And if you’re anything like Jodie Foster, you hate superhero films.
Now to be fair to Foster, she has every right to opine on what makes a movie genre worthwhile or not given she is a double Oscar-winning actor and director with some 54 years of making films behind her, but all the same you would think she might be unthreatened by the popularity of Marvel films seeing as they have attracted actors of the calibre of Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart and Samuel L Jackson.
But no, Foster is not a fan, believing that the era of lycra-suited flying folk will eventually come to an end, despite 2019’s Avengers: Endgame becoming the second highest-grossing film of all time, and the upcoming “fuck it let’s throw the kitchen sink at it” Avengers: Doomsday being on track to be the most expensive movie in cinema history.
She told Elle, “It’s a phase. It’s a phase that’s lasted a little too long for me, but it’s a phase, and I’ve seen so many different phases. Hopefully people will be sick of it soon. The good ones—like Iron Man, Black Panther, The Matrix—I marvel at those movies, and I’m swept up in the entertainment of it, but that’s not why I became an actor. And those movies don’t change my life. Hopefully there’ll be room for everything else.”
Well Jodie… in the six years or so since Endgame there seems to have been plenty of room for everything else so far, if anything the issue is more that there are so many superhero movies and TV spin-offs that it’s nigh on impossible to keep track of them all, thanks to Disney’s partnership with Marvel, James Gunn rebooting stuff left right and centre and the more grown up efforts like John Cena’s Peacemaker.
Foster, though, is doing her bit by resolutely not being in a Marvel special effects extravaganza and instead making films like her recent French language black comedy A Private Life, which won her a couple of award nominations for playing a famed psychiatrist taking it upon herself to investigate the mysterious deaths of one of her patients. It received critical acclaim across the board, with Foster’s performance described as captivating and the overall suspense at play favourably compared to Hitchcock’s work.
Scarily, it seems Foster is somehow getting even better at what she does when you look at her track record since returning to taking on more roles in 2021. She won a Golden Globe that year for the Guantanamo Bay drama The Mauritanian, followed it up with the Netflix sports drama Nyad, which won her an Oscar nomination, and then stepped into McConaughey and Harrelson’s shoes for a season of True Detective, which she duly won an Emmy for.
Seems she is doing just fine without superheroes.
