While promoting his new movie, Dark Waters, Mark Ruffalo once more waded into the controversy involving director Martin Scorsese's negative comments about Marvel Studio's films.
This time around, Marvel's Bruce Banner, Ruffalo, moved past simply rebutting the director's comments about Marvel's movies that "They turn cinemas into theme parks. They’re not cinema, they’re something else. And we shouldn’t be invaded by them" and this time he explored Scorsese's other position about how the success of Marvel movies squeeze out other films in the marketplace. Ruffalo had a suggestion that he believes that the award-winning director might appreciate.
Ruffalo was interviewed by Husam Sam Asi from BBC Cinematic for Ruffalo's new movie, Dark Waters, and Asi turned the conversation at one point to Scorsese's comments about the relatability of Marvel's films.
Ruffalo first again refuted Scorsese's claims about the relatability of the films, echoing comments that Ruffalo made recently at the Hollywood Film Awards. There, Ruffalo noted, "What really speaks to people about these movies, I think, is the heart and humanity of characters, that’s what makes Avengers: Endgame so powerful to witness — these characters that care about and reckon with the world around them ... to watch them struggle and survive and sometimes even say goodbye. That’s what makes it cinema." And here, he reiterated that he wished that Scorsese would sit in the audience of a Marvel movie and see just how much the films resonate with the audience, as Ruffalo claimed that he has never been in a film with more audience tears and reactions than his Marvel films.
However, Ruffalo mostly wanted to discuss Scorsese's financial argument regarding Marvel's films. The director wrote a New York Times Op-Ed where he argued, "So, you might ask, what's my problem?" he continued. "Why not just let superhero films and other franchise films be? The reason is simple. In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen. It's a perilous time in film exhibition, and there are fewer independent theaters than ever."
"The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There's worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there's cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that's becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other."
In that same piece, Scorsese said that he wasn't suggesting that we subsidize films, but Ruffalo, who starred in Scorsese's Shutter Island back in 2010, thinks that that is precisely what we should do. He explained, "I'd love to see Marty create a national film endowment that let young filmmakers come in that is not driven by economic but driven by precepts of art. That's really the crux of this conversation."