The Gunn went off.
James Gunn is the latest director to address Martin Scorsese’s divisive 2019 Marvel-bashing incident, claiming that the “Goodfellas” director was simply attempting to garner attention for “The Irishman.” The “Guardians of the Galaxy” director dropped the criticism while promoting his upcoming film “The Suicide Squad” on MTV’s “Happy Sad Confused” podcast.
“I just think it seems awful cynical that he would keep coming out against Marvel — and then that is the only thing that would get him press for his movie,” Gunn, 55, told pod host Josh Horowitz. “He’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it.”
He was referring to Scorsese’s 2019 interview with Empire, in which the 78-year-old Hollywood icon said that he tried to watch Marvel movies but they weren’t his cup of tea.
“I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema,” lamented the Italian-American auteur, who was doing media rounds for his gangster epic “The Irishman” at the time. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks.”
Scorsese’s critique sparked a backlash from the superhero sphere’s rabid fanbase, with “Iron Man” Robert Downey Jr. and other Marvel actors also skewering the “Departed” director over his remarks.
However, Gunn’s latest criticisms were not well received by social media cinephiles, who flocked to the Oscar winner’s defense.
“I will care about what director of Suicide Squad thinks of Martin Scorsese when he does 10% of the work Marty has done for cinema,” tweeted one Scorsese supporter.
Another wrote, “The fact that scorsese mentioned marvel once and then never brought it up again while people/interviewers in fandoms AND hollywood have not stopped mentioning it since 2019 is genuinely disturbing.”
One Twitter film buff comparatively snarked, “At 31 Martin Scorsese directed Mean Streets, a powerfully personal story about Italian-American identity, Catholic guilt, and responsibility … At 34 James Gunn published The Toy Collector, a roman à clef in which the protagonist James Gunn sticks cigarettes into his ‘penis hole.’”
‘He’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it.’
However, their defense may have been a little overzealous, as Gunn’s commentary wasn’t entirely negative. Elsewhere in the interview, the “James Gunn’s PG Porn” director said that Scorsese “said a lot of things” about Marvel movies “that I agree with.”
“There are a lot of heartless, soulless spectacle films out there that don’t reflect what should be happening,” Gunn said. “I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve talked to film directors before they went and made a big movie, and said, ‘Hey, we’re in this together, let’s do something different with these big movies. “Let’s make them something different than everything that has come before them.’
“And then see them cater to every single studio whim and be grossed out, frankly,” he concluded.
In response to the backlash, the “Scooby Doo” screenwriter added, “Also for the record, Martin Scorsese is probably the world’s greatest living American filmmaker.
“I love & study his films & will continue to love & study his films. I disagree with him solely on one point: That films based on comic books are innately not cinema, that’s all. “