Hear Me Out: Why you’re wrong about Marvel
Chloé Zhao was once labelled as one of the most promising emerging filmmakers, with the release of her 2017 film The Rider being awarded the Art Cinema Award at the Cannes Film Festival. It remains a beautifully sensitive and tender film, with Zhao spinning her own take on the western genre through this quiet and introspective tale of masculinity and faded dreams.
Her success only continued to skyrocket after the release of Nomadland in 2020, starring Frances McDormand as a woman who embarks on a trip through the Western United States after losing everything during the Great Recession, becoming a van-dwelling nomad. With breath-taking cinematography that dwells in the beauty of the natural world, alongside a cautiously hopeful story about people who precariously toe the line between freedom and security, forging their own version of the American Dream in an attempt to preserve their humanity while also being denied this by the systems in place around them.
The film was rumoured to be a favourite at the Oscars that year, but no one was able to predict the unprecedented success that occurred that evening, with Nomadland winning ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, with Zhao becoming the first Asian woman to win the coveted award. This critical sweep only cemented the director as one of the most considered and thoughtful new voices in cinema, with intense speculation about how she would follow something that had been so monumental not only creatively but historically. It is at this point that Zhao’s journey comes to an abrupt end, with the director being stolen away by Marvel to be the face of their next pointless, money-grabbing story in an attempt to diversify their slate of creators, using her reputation to boost their own image while giving her a half-baked story that no one cares about.
Eternals, released in 2021, follows a group of ancient aliens called The Eternals who have secretly been living on Earth, only to be forced away from the shadows in the wake of an unexpected tragedy that reunites them with their oldest enemy. While some audiences remained optimistic about this seemingly random fork in the road, others were firmly skeptical about this collaboration, which once again united a talented independent director with the corrosive studio that is famous for stripping creatives of all authenticity when cramming them into their reductive filmmaking model.
The studio model has done this time and time again, with individualistic voices being lured over to the dark side of commercial filmmaking with the promise of a higher budget and increased creative freedom. However, this only ever benefits one person, and it almost never works out for directors, with Zhao left in a tricky spot after Eternals was ripped apart by film lovers and critics alike and became the scapegoat for a poor story.
The idea of tacking the name of an arthouse director onto a Marvel film is like covering shit with glitter—you can do all you can to convince people that the genre carries the same weight and substance as something like Moonlight or Nomadland, but it only comes across as a desperate attempt to validate their own work. The directors used by studios like Marvel rarely recover from this process of creative assimilation, used to bolster the image of the studio and then discarded when the film inevitably fails, left to resurrect their reputation.
Marvel will never care about the artistry of the independent directors they work with; it is a selfishly motivated collaboration that only works to temporarily elevate their image, all at the expense of an emerging artist who becomes attached to a story that the studio actually doesn’t care about. They’re most likely not going to ask Zhao to direct the next Spiderman instalment because that would be too risky for them, but why not give her a second-rate B movie within their canon to make it look like they care about diversity and nurturing new voices? Never mind whether it’s bad and will actively harm their future, just as long as it makes them look good.
Make no mistake, Marvel is no friend to independent directors, and the opportunity to work with them is a death threat in disguise, despite the insistence that it is a step up from the total freedom of working independently.
