We're collecting Marvel stars' opinions on Martin Scorsese like Infinity Stones

Poor Chris Hemsworth took the news that Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino weren’t Marvel fans hard. “That’s super depressing when I hear that. There goes two of my heroes I won’t work with. I guess they’re not a fan of me,” he said in a June GQ profile.

“I’m thankful that I have been a part of something that kept people in cinemas. Now, whether or not those films were to the detriment of other films, I don’t know. I don’t love when we start scrutinizing each other when there’s so much fragility in the business and in this space of the arts as it is,” said the Thor actor. “I say that less to the directors who made those comments, who are all, by the way, still my heroes, and in a heartbeat I would leap to work with any of them. But I say it more to the broader opinion around that topic. I don’t think any of us have the answer, but we’re trying.”

Kumail Nanjiani, a Marvel star by way of Eternals, took the diplomatic approach to criticism from Scorsese and Tarantino. “I obviously love the movies Tarantino makes or Scorsese makes. And I may disagree with Scorsese’s opinion on superhero movies, but I mean, who else has earned the right to have an opinion?” He mused in Esquire magazine in January 2023. “If Scorsese hasn’t earned the right to have an opinion on movies, then none of us should have an opinion on movies. It’s so strange that people get upset about it.”

Black Panther is unique within the Marvel pantheon for its significant cultural impact—and for being the first MCU film nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Perhaps that’s why Danai Gurira’s response to Scorsese’s remarks was to highlight the auteur at the helm of her film. “Well, I’ve worked very closely with Ryan Coogler. My experience working under his helm, it’s definitely deeply cinematic in every way I can imagine,” she told GQ in November 2022.

“We’re not leaving anything at home. We’re bringing it all. We’re bringing our understanding of our culture, understanding of our humanity, of our gender, of the complexities therein of this world that we’re in, and all the specificities of this world,” she argued. “We have to come in and pour all we’ve got into this franchise. And that’s what we definitely, definitely do. We didn’t get through either movie and be like, ‘Oh, that was nothing.’ No. It was all we had. It was all we had, and then some. So I hope that’s cinema to somebody.”

Back when the whole argument was still pretty fresh in Fall 2019, Mr. Marvel himself, Robert Downey Jr., opined that “it makes no sense to say” the MCU isn’t cinema. “I appreciate [Scorsese’s] opinion. I think it’s like anything where we need all of the different perspectives so we can come to center and move on,” the Iron Man star said diplomatically.

“Of course he’s not jealous of the success,” Downey said in response to Howard Stern’s prompting. “He’s Martin Scorsese. By the way, there is a lot to be said for how these genre movies, and I was happy to be part of the ‘problem,’ if there is one, but how they have denigrated the era, the art form of cinema. When you come in like a stomping beast and you eliminate the competition in such a demonstrative way, it’s phenomenal.”

Speaking of Iron Man, the film that launched the MCU, that movie’s director (and Happy Hogan portrayer) Jon Favreau has no issue with Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola talking shit on the franchise. ​​“These two guys are my heroes and they’ve earned the right to express their opinions,” Favreau said in an interview with CNBC in 2019. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if they didn’t carve the way. They’ve served as a source of inspiration, you can go all the way back to ‘Swingers’ where I was referencing Marty, and I’ve worked with him. For me, they can express whatever opinion they’d like.”

On the other side of the camera, then-Marvel maverick (and now DC boss) James Gunn cracked his notorious Twitter fingers to respond shortly after Scorsese’s initial dismissal of the studio in 2019. “Martin Scorsese is one of my 5 favorite living filmmakers. I was outraged when people picketed The Last Temptation Of Christ without having seen the film. I’m saddened that he’s now judging my films in the same way.”

In 2021, Gunn elaborated on the Happy Sad Confused podcast (via Entertainment Weekly), saying, “I just think, you know… he just seems awful cynical—that he, you know, he would keep coming out against Marvel and then that’s the only thing that would get him press for his movie,” Gunn said, with dubious accuracy. “So then he just kept coming out against Marvel so that he could get press for his movie. So he’s creating his movie in the shadow of the Marvel films, and so he uses that to get attention for something that he wasn’t getting as much attention as he wanted for it.”

He concluded, “There [are] a lot of things that are true about what he’s said,” Gunn continued. “There are a lot of heartless, soulless, you know, spectacle films out there that don’t reflect what should be happening. I mean, I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve talked to film directors before they went in 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’s come before ‘em.’ And then see them just go and just cater to every single studio whim or what’s thought of, and just be grossed out, frankly.”

Original Avengers and longtime pals Chris Evans (a.k.a. Captain America) and Scarlett Johansson (a.k.a. Black Widow) happened to participate in Variety’s Actors on Actors conversation shortly after Scorsese’s comments in 2019. “It’s interesting, because a couple of people in the past couple of days have mentioned to me that a couple of extremely esteemed directors have been really vocal about how the whole Marvel universe and big blockbusters are really like ‘despicable’ and ‘the death of cinema,’” Johansson said. “At first I thought that seems kind of old-fashioned, and somebody had to explain to me, because it seemed so disappointing and sad in a way. They said, ‘I think what these people are saying is that at the actual theater, there’s not a lot of room for different kinds of movies, or smaller movies, because the theater is taken up by huge blockbusters.’”

Johansson generously granted that it made her consider “how people consume content now, and how there’s been this huge sea change with their viewing experience.” But in Evans’ opinion, “I think original content inspires creative content. I think new stuff is what keeps the creative wheel rolling. I just believe there’s room at the table for all of it. It’s like saying a certain type of music isn’t music. Who are you to say that?”

No surprise Mark Ruffalo, who plays the MCU’s Hulk, had a thoughtful answer about the economics of the movie biz following the publication of Scorsese’s op-ed. “If we’re living in a world where economics are how we measure the value of a society, then yeah, whoever makes the biggest thing is going to dominate,” Ruffalo said in an interview with with BBC Cinematic’s Sam Asi in 2019. “They are going to try and keep making it again and again. In that article [Scorsese] said something really interesting, and I wish he took it all the way. He said, ‘I am not suggesting that we subsidize films.’ But that’s exactly what he’s suggesting. We should have a national endowment of the arts that gives money to another kind of cinema and does support another kind of cinema.”

He continued, “If you’re working in the milieu of ‘I’m going to try and make a movie that has economic success,’ which [Scorsese] does too by the way, then how can you complain about that system when you’re not on top of it anymore? I would love to see Marty create a national film endowment, and he could do this, that lets young, new talent come in that isn’t just driven by the marketplace but driven by precepts of art. That would be amazing. That’s really the crux of this conversation.”

(For the record, Martin Scorsese is the founder and chair of The Film Foundation, whose mission is to restore and archive films across the globe. It also has an educational program to teach young people “about film language and history.” Maybe not precisely the same, but hey, you can’t say Marty isn’t doing his part.)

In 2021, Tom Holland, the latest in a string of live-action Spider-Men, purported his experience with both Marvel and high-level cinema in defense of the franchise. “You can ask [Martin] Scorsese ‘Would you want to make a Marvel movie?’ But he doesn’t know what it’s like because he’s never made one. I’ve made Marvel movies and I’ve also made movies that have been in the conversation in the world of the Oscars, and the only difference, really, is one is much more expensive than the other. But the way I break down the character, the way the director etches out the arc of the story and characters—it’s all the same, just done on a different scale. So, I do think they’re real art,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

“When you’re making these films, you know that, good or bad, millions of people will see them, whereas when you’re making a small indie film, if it’s not very good no one will watch it. So it comes with different levels of pressure,” he said. “I mean, you can also ask Benedict Cumberbatch or Robert Downey Jr. or Scarlett Johansson—people who have made the kinds of movies that are ‘Oscar-worthy’ and also made superhero movies—and they will tell you that they’re the same, just on a different scale. And there’s less Spandex in ‘Oscar movies.’”

As someone who recently recommended new Marvel actors only sign a contract for one film (presumably so they don’t get stuck in the machine), Elizabeth Olsen (a.k.a. Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch) has her own particular reason for feeling frustrated when people make MCU projects “seem like a lesser type of art.” She explained to The Independent in 2022, “I’m not saying we’re making indie art films, but I just think it takes away from our crew, which bugs me. These are some of the most amazing set designers, costume designers, camera operators— I feel diminishing them with that kind of criticism takes away from all the people who do award-winning films, that also work on these projects.”

Olsen continued, “From an actor’s point of view, whatever, I get it; I totally understand that there’s a different kind of performance that’s happening. But I do think throwing Marvel under the bus takes away from the hundreds of very talented crew people. That’s where I get a little feisty about that.”

Sebastian Stan, who plays Buck Barnes (otherwise known as the Winter Soldier), kept it brief when he was asked about the Scorsese-Marvel debate in 2019. “All I know is that all movies affect people,” he said in a Men’s Health profile (during which he apparently indicated Scorsese is one of his heroes). “I’ve certainly experienced firsthand many people who have been affected and helped by Marvel movies.”

Taika Waititi, director of Thor: Ragnarok and Thor: Love And Thunder (and the actor behind the beloved rock man Korg), took a literal approach to Scorsese’s criticism. “It’s too late for them to change the name to Marvel -atic Universe,” he told The Associated Press in 2019, with typical irony. “Of course it’s cinema! It’s at the movies. It’s in cinemas near you. Marvel Cinema…tic Universe.”

Samuel L. Jackson is one of the elder statesmen of the MCU, as both a film legend in his own right and as the franchise’s Nick Fury, the man who brought the Avengers together in the first place. So perhaps his opinion holds more weight when he dismisses Scorsese’s judgment that the movies are “not cinema.”

“That’s like saying Bugs Bunny ain’t funny. Films are films. Everybody doesn’t like his stuff either,” Jackson told Variety in 2019. “Everybody’s got an opinion, so I mean it’s okay. Ain’t going to stop nobody from making movies.”

Paul Rudd, in his infinite wisdom, went the non-answer route when he was finally cornered into responding to Scorsese’s comments in 2019. “I love Martin Scorsese, I love his movies, I can’t wait to see The Irishman,” Ant-Man deferentially told NME in 2019. “I thought I was gonna be asked this at some point and I have been. I think it’s really just… it seems to be what the state of interviews are now and I have no opinion about it.”

Simu Liu, one of the more recent heroes introduced to the MCU as the lead of Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, took a fiery approach to comments made by Scorsese and Tarantino, who said that MCU actors aren’t “movie stars.” Liu tweeted in 2022 (via Entertainment Weekly), “If the only gatekeepers to movie stardom came from Tarantino and Scorsese, I would never have had the opportunity to lead a $400 million plus movie. I am in awe of their filmmaking genius. They are transcendent auteurs. But they don’t get to point their nose at me or anyone.”

Liu’s criticism is apparently based on these being white directors whose movies are largely (though certainly not entirely) white. (Again, Scorsese is dedicated to preserving international cinema, but perhaps that’s beside the point.) Even so, Marvel is historically pretty white too, though its on-screen diversity has improved over time. “No movie studio is or ever will be perfect,” Liu admits. “But I’m proud to work with one that has made sustained efforts to improve diversity onscreen by creating heroes that empower and inspire people of all communities everywhere. I loved the ‘Golden Age’ too.. but it was white as hell.”

Ryan Reynolds, something of a Marvel outlier (in that his Deadpool films existed, at least originally, outside the MCU continuity before Disney bought Fox), objected not only to Scorsese’s Marvel dismissal but also the filmmaker’s plea for moviegoers to see his film at an actual theater. “You should be able to watch whatever the f*** you want to watch on whatever f***ing device you want to watch it on,” Reynolds told Variety in 2019. “I don’t know. I would say that’s just the way things are.”

Ethan Hawke was an unexpected addition to the MCU when he starred as the villain in Moon Knight. Perhaps being on one of Marvel’s television shows gave him a more reasoned perspective on the issue—or perhaps being an indie darling himself is why his response was among the more diplomatic. “If people like Scorsese and [Francis Ford] Coppola don’t come out to tell their truth about how there are more important things than making money, who’s going to?” Hawke questioned in an IndieWire interview.

Hawke conceded that “It’s easy for them” as wealthy, powerful filmmakers to pass such judgment, “but it needs to be somebody in the community saying, ‘Hey, everybody, this is not Fanny And Alexander,’” he argued. “If you keep reviewing these movies that are basically made for 14-year-olds like they’re Fanny And Alexander or Winter Light, then who the hell’s going to get to make Winter Light? I appreciate the elder statesmen of the community reminding people not to set the bar too low. I know it makes some people think they’re stuck up, but they’re not stuck up.

As for his own experience with Marvel, “That group of people is extremely actor-friendly,” Hawke shared. “They might not be director-friendly, and that could be what Scorsese and Coppola are talking about.”