Are you Team Scorsese or Team Marvel? Your answer to that question has likely fueled some intense social media debates over the last week. Is Martin Scorsese an old man yelling at the clouds? Are Marvel fans just insufferable fanboys (and fangirls) that wouldn’t know Ingmar Bergman from Michael Bay? Frankly, it’s all just so damn exhausting. Thankfully, much like Damon Lindelof before him, Jon Favreau is here to inject a bit of reality into the discussion.
Speaking to CNBC, Favreau was asked about the recent comments made by Martin Scorsese (echoed by Francis Ford Coppola), where the filmmaker said that Marvel movies are not “cinema” and are glorified “theme parks.” Even though you might expect Favreau, who is likely the one person that should be Marvel 4 Lyfe, to defend superhero films until his dying breath, the director took a more reverential tone in regards to Scorsese with his response.
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“These two guys are my heroes, and they have earned the right to express their opinions,” Favreau said. “I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing if they didn’t carve the way. They served as a source of inspiration, you can go all the way back to ‘Swingers’…. They can express whatever opinion they like.”
While he doesn’t necessarily answer the question about whether or not Marvel films are “cinema” (he’s taken plenty of Marvel money in the past, so we’re going to guess he’s pro-superheroes), Favreau does give fans one of the more open and shut defenses of the old men yelling at the clouds. In essence, he says that everyone should just let the men say whatever they want because they’ve earned it through their decades of stellar output.
Fair enough.
But there’s one big problem to this defense — it’s 2019 and people aren’t ever okay with just letting things happen without providing their own opinion. So, the idea that Twitter would just let Scorsese or Coppola say Marvel films are “despicable” is just unrealistic. What is the point of Twitter if not to voice your opinion using slurs, insults, and ridiculous hyperbole? Silly Jon Favreau.